


Project: Light

by lanestreets



Series: Of Children, Dogs, and Homecomings [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky's a dad - Freeform, Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Deaf Clint Barton, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Kid Fic, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-05 23:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 54,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14629599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanestreets/pseuds/lanestreets
Summary: When Steve and Sam finally track down the Winter Soldier, the last thing they’re expecting is to find Bucky with a girl who’s calling him ‘Dad’. Steve doesn’t quite know how to handle that. The others know how to handle it only marginally better.Or, how to win over children and influence monsters: how Bucky’s surprise daughter helps the Avengers help Bucky find himself again, and how he finds Steve again along the way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so this takes place pre-civil war, or like, instead of civil war, i guess, so avengers and co. will meet t'challa and co. in another way in this universe. a time line? i don't know her. 
> 
> the child in this story is bucky's biological child, but there is no mention of rape/non-con in this story. bucky does discuss how some hydra folks took his dna to create the child, but it is in a taking blood sort of manner, nothing more, and it is only mentioned, but just keep an eye out for that, just in case.
> 
> onward!

It starts like this:

Steve enters the safe house he’d tracked Bucky to quietly. He makes sure that no one has followed him here, besides Sam, hovering over the house just in case something goes south and he needs back up. He makes sure that the floorboards don’t creak under his feet. He makes sure that he doesn’t trigger any traps or alarms that Bucky might have set up. 

He gets as far as the kitchen, from the back door. It’s not very far. 

He turns to step into the living room, and he sees an assortment of children’s toys, out of place in the otherwise empty home. 

It starts like this: 

Steve crouches to examine the toys, and when he stands again, he is met with a fist to the face. He stumbles back, almost crashing to his knees with the force of the hit.

“Cap! What’s happening?” Sam’s voice crackles back over the line. Steve does no answer, because he is busy getting punched in the face again. This time he does fall, just barely catching himself before his face meets the ground. 

He groans, but turns in time to catch his attacker’s fist when they swing again. 

“Bucky?”

It starts like this:

Steve catches Bucky’s other fist before he can try to swing at him from the other side. 

Bucky struggles in Steve’s grasp. 

“Woah, hey, Bucky, it’s okay, it’s just me, it’s Steve, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m just here to talk. It’s me, Buck, come on,” Steve pleads. 

Bucky stops struggling, but the tension does not leave his body.

It takes another long minute, but Bucky finally says, “Steve?” and Steve relaxes a bit. He releases Bucky’s hands slowly.

“Steve, what’s going on in there? If you don’t answer, I’m landing,” Sam says over the comms, his voice laced with worry.

“No,” Steve snaps back, and Bucky’s face gets very confused, and then his jaw sets.

“Who else is here?” he bites out through clenched teeth, surging forward to press Steve into the wall, his flesh hand at Steve’s neck, applying just enough pressure to be a threat. 

Steve shakes his head and grasps Bucky’s wrist a little desperately. “I brought a friend. His name’s Sam Wilson.”

“You’re not going to take her away from me.”

“Take who?” Steve asks, raising a hand to his throat absently as Bucky lets him go.

Right at that moment, Steve hears footsteps upstairs, and then footsteps on the stairs. And they are very small footsteps. 

It starts like this: 

A moment after the tiny feet have descended the stairs, a tiny head pokes around the corner. 

It’s a little girl, her dark hair in two frizzy french braids, her blue eyes bright and fixed on Steve. Dear god, she looks just like Bucky.

“Dad?” the girl asks and Bucky melts at her voice, dropping to one knee so that he’s eye level with her. 

“Yana,” he says, in a low voice, his tone soft and chastising all at once. It sounds a lot like how Bucky would sound when he would tell Steve off for getting into fights back Before. Steve would get hung up on that sentimentality if it were not for the fact that there is a little girl calling Bucky ‘Dad’ standing right in front of him. “I told you to stay upstairs.”

Steve freezes, not daring to move. Sam says something over the comms. Steve hears it, doesn’t process it, and ultimately ignores it.

There is a girl that looks exactly like Bucky, standing there and calling him ‘ _ Dad _ ’. Steve doesn’t know how to react to this.

“But there was a flying man outside my window!” 

Steve slaps a hand to his face. 

Sam. 

“Sam, you scared the kid,” Steve mutters into his comm.

“I was trying to tell you that! I saw movement in a window upstairs and I came down to check out what it was. Didn’t think it’d be a kid,” Sam argues. 

Steve sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“That was my friend Sam,” Steve says quietly, and Bucky snaps his attention to Steve. “We didn’t know that there was anyone else here with you. He saw movement and was checking it out. Neither of us are here to hurt her.”

“Why are you here then?” Bucky asks.

“Who are you?” Yana asks at the same time. 

Steve crouches to Yana’s level and answers her question first, glancing towards the back door as Sam enters quietly. “My name’s Steve, and this is my friend Sam. We just want to talk to your dad if that’s okay with you both.”

Bucky hesitates for a long minute before nodding. 

“You wanna take a look at my wings?” Sam offers and Yana smiles widely, though she hangs back for a moment, until Bucky nods for her to go. Sam and Yana step into the kitchen, still visible from where Bucky and Steve are sitting in the living room. 

Bucky speaks to Steve, but doesn’t take his eyes off of Yana and Sam. 

“What are you here for, Steve?” Bucky demands. 

“We’ve been looking for you for months. Since you pulled me from the Potomac. Sam was even looking for you while we were in Sokovia. I just want to know you’re okay.” Steve takes a deep breath and glances at Sam and Yana through the door into the kitchen. “And I wanted to offer for you to come back to the upstate facility with us. You don’t have to be on the run, anymore. Especially with all the files Nat leaked about S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA, we can make sure you’re in the clear and you could have a place to stay. I didn’t know about the girl, but that doesn’t change things.”

“Don’t call her that. She’s got a name. Her name is Yana, and she is the most important thing in this world,” Bucky says with so much conviction Steve has to tamp down an urge to shy away from him. 

“She really is yours, then, huh?”

Bucky nods. He rubs his metal palm with his thumb, over and over and over again. Like a nervous tick. “Yes.”

Steve’s heart seizes in his chest, and he has to clench his hands into fists and take a few deep breaths to steady himself before he even thinks about speaking. He doesn’t get to. 

“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong. They didn’t… HYDRA hurt me, but not like that. They just took some of my DNA and spliced it with someone else’s to stabilize it and made Yana. I didn’t even know about her until the bridge.”

“The bridge?”

“The bridge. You. The first time you said my name. I started remembering again, when you called me Bucky. They fried it out of me right after, but then I remembered you again, on the helicarrier. And I started remembering more. I remembered her. I got her away from whatever scraps of HYDRA were clinging together.” Bucky states all of this with no inflection in his voice, his tone flat, like he’s debriefing someone after a mission, which Steve supposes is easy for him to default to. 

Steve shakes that thought from his head quickly. “She wasn’t mentioned in any of the files Nat leaked.”

“Project Light, commencement date April 25, 2010. That’s how they listed it.”

“Is that--”

“They went based on her birthday. She’s about to turn six. It was a need to know basis project. Kept it real quiet. On the plus side, means a lot of HYDRA doesn’t know she exists. Made it harder for me to find her though.” There’s a whirring noise in Bucky’s arm as he clenches his metal hand into a fist and relaxes it a few times. 

“Come back to the Avengers facility. Buck, we can help you, and we can help her.”

“You can put us both under lock and key,” Bucky snarls, suddenly glaring at Steve, his expression steely.

“We’re not gonna lock you up. We’re going to help you. Make sure your name is cleared, and make sure that Yana has a stable home. Living out of safe houses can’t be good for a kid her age. She’s gonna have to go to school, Bucky, and she’s going to need to have friends her age, and be a kid. Do it for her, if nothing else,” Steve pleads, feeling a little bad for using Bucky’s kid against him like this, but he needs to convince Bucky to come with them. He wants to ensure Bucky’s name is cleared for good, and he can’t do that with Bucky on the run like he really is guilty. “Come and stay for a few months, just for long enough for us to make sure your name is cleared, and then, if you don’t want to stay any longer, you’re free to go. You take Yana and you can leave. No one will stop you.”

“Yana will be kept out of all of that?” It’s a question, but it sounds more like a demand. 

“I can’t promise that her name won’t come up, but I’ll make sure no lawyers or anything come anywhere near her,” Steve says, and he means it. This kid is Bucky’s daughter. He’ll protect her, come hell or high water. 

Till the end of the line.

It starts like this:

“I’ll have our stuff ready to go in five minutes.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some introductions and a bit of a surprise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god i wish i could update things at a normal fucking hour, anyway, there's a playlist for this fic [here](http://grxysxns.tumblr.com/post/173847050826/light-a-project-light-playlist-for-lost-people) now
> 
> here we go, onward.

True to his word, Bucky has his and Yana’s things ready to go in four minutes and thirty seven seconds. Yana has contented herself playing with Redwing, Sam’s little drone flying around the kitchen at Yana’s command, bumping into Steve’s head twice. He thinks that bit was Sam’s doing, but he’s not saying anything. Yana seems happy, so it’s fine.

As soon as Bucky comes into the room with two bags slung over his shoulders, though, Yana hops down from the stool she had been sitting on and looks up at him.

“Is it time to go again? You said we were gonna stay here longer this time,” she pouts, but she takes her bag from Bucky all the same. Bucky hands her something else too, a tattered stuffed dog with a Captain America shield strapped to it’s tiny back. Sam makes a face at Steve, and Steve smirks. Bucky narrows his eyes at Sam and ignores that Steve did anything.

Sam looks offended.

Steve raises an eyebrow and that silences Sam quickly enough, and they head towards the quinjet without further incident.

Yana, for her part, is fascinated by the quinjet and immediately tries to push every button she can get her tiny little hands on. Sam has to swat her hands away from the controls, and wrestle her into a seat.

Steve thought Bucky would want to do that, but the second they had stepped onto the quinjet, Bucky had gone rigid. His eyes are still trained on Yana, watching every move she makes, every move Sam makes, but he’s hardly moving himself. He’s frozen near the ramp, metal hand braced on something overhead, and the other clutched tightly on the strap of his bag.

“Bucky?” Steve asks quietly and Bucky flinches away from him, looking up with wide eyes, just on the edge of wild.

“Hey, dad,” Yana says, and Bucky’s eyes snap to her immediately. There’s a long moment where his hand just flexes on his bag’s strap, and his jaw sets, eyes dangerously dark. “Are you gonna sit with me or with your friends?”

There’s a beat of silence, and then Bucky takes a deep breath and goes to sit across from Yana. Steve ponders that interaction for a second before taking a seat next to Sam.

They make it to the upstate facility without incident, though Bucky stays tense and silent in his seat the entire time. He doesn’t breathe a word and move an inch.

Yana, on the other hand, makes up a story about her dog Sasha, and narrates their entire journey from somewhere over Pennsylvania until they touch down in Upstate New York.

The second the ramp drops when they touch down, Bucky is up and out of the quinjet, his metal hand clenched into a tight fist. Steve can hear a soft whirring coming from the arm as he helps Yana from the quinjet.

Bucky’s face goes carefully blank as they approach, though, so Steve doesn’t say anything about his reaction. There’s a time for all of the serious conversation later. Now is time for a few introductions and for getting Bucky and Yana situated.

They hadn’t been anticipating Yana’s existence, so the quarters they’ve got set up for Bucky has just the one bed and a couch, but they’ll figure something out soon enough. Stark probably won’t even think about it if they say Bucky needs another bed in his room. At least until Yana is a little older.

Steve leads Bucky and Yana to their room and explains everything to them, going to apologize before Bucky cuts him off. “It’s fine. I can sleep on the couch.”

“Alright, we’ll still try to figure something out for you, so you’re not stuck on that forever. I’ll let you guys settle in. We’ll have dinner in a bit, if you want to venture out into the compound. If not, I can bring you both something. Just, I’ll come check on you in a bit,’ Steve says, before excusing himself and beelining for the kitchen.

Sam has his head in the fridge, when Steve gets there, but he still manages to start speaking the second Steve steps into the room.

“I told you this was going to be rough, Rogers,” he says plainly, finally emerging from the fridge with two bottles in hand. He pops them open and hands a beer to Steve, taking a swig from the other himself.

Steve takes a slow sip and starts to pick at the label on the bottle. “I didn’t think it’d be like this. I was expecting to find him different, I wasn’t expecting the kid. That’s something else entirely.”

Sam nods, and leans forward on his elbows on the kitchen island, while Steve takes a seat across from him. “Is it just Yana? Or is it more than that? Maybe that he’s not exactly the same Bucky that you remember?”

Steve nods and his shoulders slump. “I know that I have no right to be upset about it. People change, and after everything he went through, it’s only to be expected that Buck would be different.”

“But you still had your hopes up?”

Steve nods. “It was stupid to get high hopes.”

“Steve, you’re allowed to be upset. Yeah, maybe you should’ve prepared a little better for this outcome, but you got your friend back and then it turns out he’s totally different. It’s almost like you’re mourning him all over again. You’re allowed to do that. Just don’t let that get in the way of you building a new relationship with Bucky. He’s gonna need a support system, and you’re the only one who understands how displaced he’ll feel, even if you don’t get all of it. So take your time, mourn, just don’t let that get in the way of you helping Bucky. You brought him here, you can’t abandon him now,” Sam says. He’s using a voice that’s dangerously close to his Therapist Voice, but Steve doesn’t call him out for it.

Instead he just nods, and peels the label the rest of the way off of his bottle. “What do I do about… I mean, a kid? He’s got a child.”

“Yes he does. And I don’t know how he feels about how she came about, so I can’t really help you much there. But just let him know you’ll be there for him, whatever or however he needs, and then let him come to you when he’s comfortable. Be there, but don’t hover.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Sam.” Steve’s smile falls flat, and Sam doesn’t comment on it. Steve is grateful for that.

“I’m gonna hunt down someone else to help me figure out dinner. Don’t mope for too long. It doesn’t look good on you,” Sam jokes, and then he’s gone, off into the compound.

Steve only gets a few minutes of quiet contemplation before Tony comes into the kitchen, half coated in motor oil and grease, with a hole singed in the bottom of his shirt.

“No coffee in the workshop,” he mumbles in explanation as he presses a number of buttons on the overly-complicated machine on the counter.

“I didn’t know you were paying us a visit, Stark,” Steve says, a little surprised at Tony’s presence at the compound.

“I’m working on an upgrade for Rhodey’s suit, came up to get that working and say hi. Thought I’d find you all in pretty good shape, but damn, you look even worse than me, Cap. The hell happened to you?”

“Sam and I followed up on a lead about Bucky.”

“I remember. You come up empty?” Tony asks over the hiss of the coffee maker as it finishes his drink.

Steve shakes his head.

“Why the long face then?”

“Nothing you have to worry about,” Steve says. He stands and empties the beer bottle down the sink and gets himself a glass of water instead.

Tony watches this all with a neutral face, and then raises his eyebrows and sighs.

“Steve, you know you don’t have to internalize everything. I’m probably the world’s biggest hypocrite for saying that, but that’s not important right now. I’m asking cause you’re my friend, and you look upset, and I want to help if I can.”

Steve hesitates for a long moment. “We found Bucky.”

“Well, that’s great! What’s got you looking like someone kicked your puppy then?”

“We found Bucky, but he’s not the same as he used to be, which isn’t an issue, it’s just jarring.” Steve takes a deep breath before continuing. On the exhale, it turns into something a little like a hysterical laugh, and Tony’s eyes widen a fraction. “And not only that, but he’s got a kid! A little girl.”

Tony’s eyes widen a lot then. “Barnes has a kid?”

Steve nods, slumps into a barstool, and puts his face in his hands. “A daughter. Her name’s Yana. She’s about to turn six.”

“That’s not possible. JARVIS and I scoured every inch of the files Nat leaked. There’s no mention of there being Winter Soldier spawn.”

Steve scrubs a hand over his face, and, pinching the bridge of his nose, looks towards the ceiling. “Hey, FRIDAY. Any mention of a Project: Light in the HYDRA files?”

There’s a beat of silence and then, “Yes, Captain Rogers. There is a Project: Light in the HYDRA data that I have access to. Would you like me to read you the details?”

“No,” Steve snaps immediately, earning him a look from Tony. He takes a slow breath and looks to Tony. “That’s Yana’s file. Buck said everything about her was ‘need to know’ so they must have kept everything coded.”

“Is he positive the kid’s his?” Tony asks.

“Really?”

“Just wondering. I’ll take that as a yes. Okay. So you said your mission wasn’t a bust. That mean Barnes and the girl are here now?”

Steve nods. “They’re settling in to the quarters we set up for Bucky. Gonna need to invest in a bed for her, until he’s comfortable enough to have her in her own room.”

“FRIDAY.”

“Yes, sir?” FRIDAY responds immediately.

“Order a children’s bed to be delivered as soon as possible for Barnes’ daughter.”

“Right away sir,” the AI responds, and then goes silent.

“Thanks, Tony,” Steve says softly, almost like he hadn’t expected his friend to do this one simple thing.

“Don’t mention it. Look, I have no idea what’s going on with your friend, or his kid, but whatever Barnes might need, we’re all here if either of you need us.” Tony waits a second, nods decisively and then turns on his heel. “Gotta get back to my workshop. See you when I see you, Captain Fancy Pants.” And then Tony is gone and Steve is once again left on his own.

~*~

Twenty minutes later finds Sam returning with Wanda in tow, Wanda looking thoroughly displeased about having to help cook dinner.

“Hey, it was you or Vision, and I wouldn’t trust him to help me in the kitchen if he was the last guy on the planet.”

Wanda still looks a little perturbed but she does crack a little smile. “I suppose you’re not wrong,” she finally admits, and she and Sam get to work cooking enough to feed a small army, which, to be fair, is sort of what they are.

Steve watches them move around the kitchen without really processing anything that’s going on. He hears them talking, but doesn’t hear what they say, he sees them cooking but doesn’t see what they’re making. Eventually, as the last pot goes into the sink, Steve snaps back to attention, and asks FRIDAY to alert the others that dinner’s ready.

Tony makes a brief appearance to grab another cup of coffee and a plate and then disappears again. Sam plates some food for Wanda, then Steve, then himself. Steve accepts the plate with muttered thanks and without looking at Sam.

His eyes are fixed on the entrance to the kitchen. He’s seconds away from getting up to check on Bucky and Yana when Bucky steps slowly into the room. Steve lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

Bucky scans the room, his gaze resting on Wanda for a second longer than anywhere else in the room. She shifts uncomfortably but doesn’t comment on Bucky’s scrutiny.

Instead, she politely says, “I didn’t know we had company. Who’s this?”

Bucky looks at her again, narrows his eyes, and then steps further into the room, Yana a few steps behind him.

Wanda lights up when Yana appears. “Hello, Little One,” she says with a wide smile.

“Buck, this is Wanda Maximoff. Wanda, this is my old friend Bucky Barnes, and his daughter Yana. They’re going to be staying with us for a bit,” Steve explains, nodding towards the kitchen island they’re currently seated around in invitation. There’s only a split second of hesitation before Bucky herds Yana forward and helps her into a seat.

Wanda plates some food for Yana and the girl beams. She glances back at Bucky, and must find something in his expression, because when she turns back to Wanda, she’s got a lot to say about Wanda’s hair and her jacket and the gemstone on her necklace. Wanda is more than happy to indulge Yana’s questions, talking to her excitedly as Bucky takes the seat next to Yana, across from Steve, Sam and Wanda.

Bucky does not get comfortable like Yana does. She eats quickly but keeps interrupting herself to talk to Wanda. Bucky’s eyes dart around like he’s expecting someone to melt out of the walls and make a move for Yana, and he eats like he thinks someone’s going to take it from him. His body is rigid with tension.

“Hey guys,” Rhodey greets as he steps into the kitchen a few minutes later, and Bucky snaps his attention to the door fast enough that it almost gives Steve whiplash just watching him. “Oh. Company? Didn’t know we were allowed to have visitors,” he says with a laugh and questioning look at Steve.

Sam watches Bucky like he’s expecting things to go south, like he’s ready to intervene.

“Bucky’s gonna be staying for a while, Rhodes,” Steve says, and Rhodey does a double take.

“Oh shit,” he mutters. Steve assumes he wasn’t meant to hear that. “Sergeant Barnes. I didn’t recognize you. You know those pictures in the museums and everything don’t do you justice.” It’s a poor attempt at a joke, but no one points that out. “And who’s the little one?” Rhodey asks, his eyebrows a little higher than normal, but otherwise, his surprise is contained.

“Yana,” Bucky says shortly.

“James, this is Bucky’s daughter,” Sam says. “They’re going to be here until we ensure that Bucky’s name is cleared.”

Rhodey nods once, and pointedly does not pull a face, though it looks like it takes him a lot of effort not to. “Well, it’s nice to meet you both, but I’ve gotta get back to the workshop to make sure Tony doesn’t irrevocably screw up my armor with his ‘upgrades’.” He scoops up the plate he’d come for and high tails it out of the room.

“Who else is here?” Bucky demands, turning to Steve as soon as Rhodey is out of sight. His metal hand curls into a fist and something whirs in his arm.

“It’s just us, Rhodey, Vision and Natasha. Tony’s visiting for a few days to upgrade Rhodey’s armor. They’re the only ones who have access to this part of the compound," Steve answers.

“Natasha?” Bucky asks.

And, ever the master of perfect timing, Natasha chooses that moment to walk into the room.

She stops dead in her tracks and looks from Yana to Bucky, more emotion written in her face than she’s ever shown before.

“James?”

“Natalia?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> natasha takes a bit of control, and everyone is a little uncomfortable. being a superhero has some not great side effects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lowkey mention of a nightmare, and you know, the general ptsd thing for this whole fic.
> 
> geronimo

“It’s Natasha, now,” is the first thing out of Natasha’s mouth, her words firm, but her voice still quiet, and her face still looks like she’s seen a ghost. 

“Natasha,” Bucky says, like he’s testing how the name feels in his mouth. 

“I didn’t know you’d brought him back.” That’s directed at Steve. Steve, for his part, just looks on dumbfounded. 

Natasha had given him the files that had lead them to finding Bucky, why does she look so surprised?

“I know you,” Bucky says finally, slicing through the tension like a knife. He seems uncertain, like he doesn’t know quite where he knows Natasha from.

“No you don’t. You knew Natalia Alianovna Romanova. I am Natasha Romanoff. Natalia is dead,” Natasha says, low, slow and deadly serious. 

Bucky nods once, like with that one statement she’s killed his train of thought, and then her expression melts into something warmer. 

“And who is this?” she asks sweetly, with a slight smile. She reaches out and runs a gentle hand over Yana’s head, smoothing the girl’s hair back away from her face.

“Yana,” Bucky says, “my daughter.”

Natasha’s smile falls quickly. Her eyes snap up to Bucky’s face, then Steve’s. She doesn’t speak, but her expression, for once, gives away everything. 

Natasha steps away and focuses on getting herself some dinner instead of continuing that particular conversation. 

“So. How long will you be staying with us, James?” she asks instead, her tone all forced politeness.

Bucky shrugs with just his right shoulder. His metal arm stays resting heavy on the counter between him and Yana. “Steve wants to clear my name. However long that takes, I guess.” Bucky doesn’t sound very sure about what he’s saying, like he’s just parroting back what was told to him. Steve sets his jaw and clenches his fists. 

“This place is cool. I like it,” Yana says with a decisive nod. She seems very serious in a way only a child can be. It cuts through the true heaviness that’s settled over the room like a hot knife through butter. Natasha’s expression settles then, less poorly concealed emotion, more easy containment of her feelings. 

Normalcy. 

Steve takes a breath. Leave it to the kid to lighten the mood. He’s suddenly almost grateful for Yana’s presence, even if he’s still profoundly concerned by it. 

There’s obviously a heavy conversation that needs to happen. There’s a cloud hanging over everyone’s heads with Bucky in the room, there’s a huge question mark hovering around Yana’s entire being, there’s something between Bucky and Natasha that Steve can’t begin to decipher. 

But there seems to be a collective silent agreement to remain silent on the seriousness at least temporarily. 

Wanda laughs at Yana and tells her to eat her vegetables. Yana agrees and turns back to picking at her food. Natasha takes a measured breath, and takes a seat at Yana’s other side. Bucky’s metal arm tenses, curling into a fist tight enough that Steve could swear it creaks. 

Yana glances at him, glances down at his arm and swaps out her plate for his. She hops off her stool and goes to Bucky’s other side, poking his flesh arm once, twice, until he shifts to her vacated stool. Yana climbs up onto Bucky’s stool and goes back to her dinner without uttering a word. The others all watch curiously, but no one comments. 

It’s an odd thing to witness, but Bucky relaxes minutely when he’s placed between Natasha and Yana. 

As young as she is, this girl seems to understand at least a few things about her father’s turbulent emotional state, and knows how to help him. It’s interesting to say the least, and incredibly helpful. 

Wanda turns back to her dinner for lack of anything else to do. Sam continues to watch Yana and Bucky carefully. Steve’s hands are trembling, so he curls them up to hide it and hopes no one’s noticed.

“Well, we’re glad to have you here, Yana,” Natasha says, breaking the silence by picking up the conversation they had been having. “Have you talked to Stark about getting his lawyers involved? I’m sure they’d be happy to help when this inevitably goes to trial.”

“I told him Bucky’s here, but he’s busy with the upgrades to the War Machine armor. I only got to have a quick conversation with him,” Steve responds, and the new topic to focus on draws him out of his head just enough that he can relax a little bit. 

“We’ll get Stark’s legal team up to date as soon as we can. Until then, the knowledge that James and Yana are here does not leave this compound. We don’t want to risk what’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D. or HYDRA finding out about you two. It’s safer that way,” Natasha orders and Steve nods in agreement. It only makes sense. 

“That mean we’re on house arrest?” Bucky asks, his tone biting but still barely louder than a mutter.

“It means you’re in protective custody until this is cleared up, if this is still the path you want to go. We can’t stop you from leaving, but I’ll highly recommend that you stay put. You’ll have access to the entire living area of the compound. That’s your quarters, common areas, the gym, training rooms, and if Stark likes you, maybe he’ll let you visit his workshop.”

Bucky makes an amused noise. His face stays carefully blank.  “S’pose there are worse places to be stuck.”

Natasha stills, and Steve knows she’s repressing a reaction. He doesn’t ask. 

Wanda fidgets, and Steve makes a note to talk to her later. 

They finish their dinner in silence. Bucky stands first, Sam following, offering to show Bucky and Yana back to their quarters. Bucky scowls, and Yana accepts the offer. Steve’s sure Sam’s going to offer to listen if Bucky needs to talk, and if he still knows Bucky at all, Bucky is going to refuse him. Natasha leaves in their wake, without so much as a goodbye. 

Wanda gathers the remaining dishes and with a flick of her wrist, they are cleaning themselves over the sink. She stares at them dully. 

“What’s on your mind, kid?” She’s legally been an adult since just before Sokovia, sure, but Wanda’s still so young, it makes Steve’s heart hurt to know she’s caught up in so much seriousness. She’s still a kid, for all that it matters. She’s a kid to him and he feels more than a little protective of her. 

“I do not want your friend to know that Pietro and I,” she stumbles over her brother’s name and Steve moves to stand beside her. He presses his shoulder against hers and they lean back again the kitchen island together, though they don’t look at each other. “I do not want him to know we ever worked for HYDRA.”

Steve’s a little taken aback by that. He hadn’t been expecting it, at least. “Why’s that?”

“We chose to work for those… those monsters. We left, but we did still choose it. But Bucky, he was the Winter Soldier. Wasn’t he?” Steve nods once, his jaw set. “He had no choice, did he?”

“No, no he didn’t.”

“I do not want him to know that we ever chose to work with the people who made him suffer like that.”

Steve wraps his arm around her shoulders and gives her an awkward sideways hug. “You made a mistake in the past. We all have. You recognize your mistake, and you’re working to make up for it. That’s all anyone could ever ask of you. No one’s going to tell Bucky anything about you that you don’t want them to. Just don’t think we’re holding anything against you. Okay?”

Wanda smiles then, Steve can see it in the reflection on the window, and rests her head on his shoulder for a brief moment. The dishes put themselves away with a snap, and Wanda rights herself. 

“Thank you, Steve.” 

“Don’t mention it.”

And then she’s gone too, and Steve is left on his own. 

Being alone has never felt more lonely.

~*~

In the middle of the night, Steve hears screaming through the walls. They are supposed to be mostly soundproof.

He’s up, breathing heavily and looking around for a gun and listening for the sound of gunfire too, before he even realizes what’s happening. 

As soon as he does realize what’s happening, he’s out of his room like a shot, tugging on a shirt as his door shuts behind him. Bucky’s quarters are right next to his, but the door’s still a little ways down the hall, and Steve feels like it takes ages for him to get there. 

When he does, the door is closed, and Yana is sitting on the floor in the hallway, her stuffed dog settled in her lap. Steve reaches for the door handle and Yana pipes up. 

“Not supposed to do that. Dad says it happens sometimes. He gets bad dreams. You’re s’posed to just leave him alone and he’ll be better in the morning, most of the times.” She’s tracing a pattern on the floor that Steve can just barely make out from his height. 

A noise inside the room makes Steve jump. Yana just looks towards the door with sad eyes. 

“How much does this happen, kiddo?” 

Yana looks a little confused by the nickname, but it quickly gives way to a look of extreme concentration. 

“A lot of nights. He’s not loud like this a lot. He’s quiet a lot of the time, and I can’t hear him cause I used to have my own room. But I can always tell when he has bad dreams. His arm gets funny the next day. The metal one. Gets sticky,” Yana says, her voice a low whisper, still tracing over shapes she finds in the design of the flooring. 

“What do you mean sticky?” Steve asks, giving the door one last look before he takes a seat next to Yana, cross-legged, completely dwarfing her smaller frame. 

“I dunno. Looks like it’s harder for him to use it or somethin’.” Steve ponders that for a moment, and then Yana continues speaking. “You guys are the Avengers right? You guys fight bad guys? I wanna fight bad guys one day too. Like the bad guys I used to live with. I think I can too, it’ll be super cool. You’re Captain America, right? I’m gonna be just like you one day. Or like my dad. You guys are cool.” 

Yana talks herself to sleep, slumped against Steve’s side. 

Steve doesn’t move. 

He wakes up there the next morning, sans Yana. 

Sure enough, when Steve sees him later that day, Bucky’s avoiding using his metal arm.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter clint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) i am ignoring mcu clint's family cause i want to  
> b) clint is deaf  
> c) i want to see more of them being friends  
> d) keep an eyes out once again for some sort of intenser than average conversations about tragic backstories
> 
> forward.

Clint comes home from a mission three days later, with his hearing aids hissing in his ears, bleeding onto the floor and cursing like a sailor as he stumbles into the compound. 

He crashes onto the couch closest to his entrance and curses again and calls for FRIDAY in a pathetic tone to ask him to call someone for him. 

“Mister Barton, now seems like a good time for me to point out that you’re not alone,” FRIDAY says, the sound fed directly to his hearing aids, and Clint sits bolt upright.

“Who the hell are you?” he asks at the same time as the familiar looking stranger across the room from him. 

Clint just barely hears a child’s voice respond, “I’m Yana,” as though both questions were for her. The stranger’s eyes flit to her for half a second before he’s focused on Clint again. 

That’s when Clint looks to her too, and his eyes widen even more. He looks up towards the ceiling to call to FRIDAY, and stands, in case he has to fight this stranger, and his knees promptly give out, and his head moves towards the floor very quickly. 

He does not hit the floor. 

He is confused. 

The stranger has an arm wrapped around his chest, and Clint’s bruised ribs really don’t like that, but his head really appreciates it. He rights himself slowly and gives the guy a once over. Long hair, looks like he hasn’t slept in decades, ridiculously fast reflexes, metal arm. 

Winter Soldier, Clint’s brain unhelpfully supplies. 

Clint clears his throat. 

“Uh. Hi. I’m Clint. I live here.” 

The man--Winter Soldier-- turns his back as he speaks and Clint’s hearing aids choose that moment to briefly stop working, and Clint can’t hear his response. 

“Can you repeat that?” Clint asks. 

Winter Soldier turns to look at his with an odd look on his face, and Clint gestures at his head. The guy narrows in on Clint’s hearing aids quickly and cocks his head to the side as though he can’t tell what they are. 

Still, he repeats, “I’m Bucky. Rogers’ friend.”

“And I’m Yana!” the girl repeats, too, with a wide smile in Clint’s direction. Clint can’t help but smile back. 

“She yours?” Clint asks, looking back to Bucky. 

Bucky nods. A lot of bad possibilities flood through Clint’s mind. 

And then the world abruptly spins and he remembers that he’s still got a shoddily patched up stab wound and what’s likely a broken arm and he really needs to get that checked out. He brushes a hand over the wound and hisses. His fingers are red when he draws them away. He’s torn his stitches, great. 

His left hearing aid squeals in his ear and he finally gives up and paws the thing out. So much for Stark’s indestructible tech. His old hearing aids were just fine, thank you. 

Bucky’s waving his hand in front of Clint’s face. Shit. Did he miss something? Clint looks at Bucky again and nods. 

“You’re bleeding,” Bucky says, as though Clint isn’t acutely aware of this fact. 

Clint nods and smirks. “Happens a lot.” Absently, out of habit because he’s not wearing one of his hearing aids, he attempts to sign along as he speaks, but dear god, moving his wrist like that  _ hurts _ . He decides to not do that again. Definitely fractured something in his arm. “Minor stab wound, probably fractured arm. I’ve just gotta hop down to medical and hope that someone’s down there.”

Bucky says something that Clint doesn’t register. Clint looks to the ceiling. 

“Hey FRIDAY, alert any docs on the premise that I need help not dying. Thanks pal.”

In the end, it turns out that Clint has a hairline fracture on one of his ribs, a worse fracture in both bones in his arm, and he did a very shitty job patching himself up on the way back so he lost more blood than he would have liked to lose. He’s going to live though, so the second he’s got a cast on his arm, he’s gone, not wanting to stay there any longer than he has to. Labs still make him uneasy after the whole Loki fiasco. 

When he comes back up to the common area are digging up his spare set of hearing aids, Bucky and the kid are still there. Yana’s transfixed by some cartoon playing on the flat screen and Bucky’s got a tablet balanced on his knees and a mug of coffee in his metal hand. 

Clint is there to look for the phone he dropped when he came stumbling in like an drunken moron, but Yana looks up and see him and starts speaking a mile a minute and suddenly Clint’s sitting down uncomfortably close to Bucky’s metal arm and trying to follow along with what his daughter’s saying. 

God, this kid had probably never had another decent person to talk to besides her father before Steve brought her here. So Clint just nods along and smiles and Bucky doesn’t kill him, so he assumes it’s okay. 

Sam comes in at some point, sits down across the room with his laptop and types out a report, makes pleasant conversation with Clint for a while in sign language, and then disappears again. Wanda passes through briefly and says hi, lifts up a piece of the puzzle that Yana’s moved on to and puts it into place with her powers, and then goes on her way. Yana’s delighted by that, though Bucky tenses up about it. 

The others pass through every once in a while, at some point, dinner is served and they all make for that. Natasha greets Clint with a hug and a kiss on the cheek and a ‘glad you’re home’. Clint regales the others with the tale of why he’s out of commission for the next four weeks. People start washing dishes and filtering out, off to their own quarters or to the lab or to the gym or a training simulator. Clint heads off to type up his mission report, which takes him longer than he really cares for and he’s exhausted so he passes out as soon as he hits the bed. 

He’s up not even two hours later, sweating and breathing hard, his brain working double time to convince himself that there is not Norse trickster god in the corner of his bedroom. 

He knows sleep is going to elude him for a while after that particular nightmare, so he heads for the common area to poke around the kitchen. Some tea and a snack will calm his mind, maybe. 

He’s not surprised to find someone else in the common area already, nightmares aren’t exactly uncommon in this line of work, but he is a little surprised to find that it’s Bucky. 

He’s sitting there hunched over, alone, with a his metal arm resting heavy on one knee, his flesh hand tangled in his long hair. 

Clint makes two mugs of tea. 

“Banner--the Hulk-- he swears by this stuff. Says it’s calming or some shit,” Clint says as he sets down the mug on the table within Bucky’s reach. 

He steps away then, and takes a seat across from Bucky and drinks his tea and stares out the floor to ceiling windows, not focusing on anything. 

A silence settles over the room. It is not uncomfortable. 

After a long while, Bucky leans forward and raises a hand to get Clint’s attention. 

He speaks very slowly, like he doesn’t know how to interact with Clint at all. Clint thinks it’s a little amusing, if not irritating. 

“I have a question.” He sounds unsure. Clint has to work not to laugh. 

“You don’t have to do that. My hearing aids were on the fritz before. I can make out what you’re saying well enough now. Just make sure you’re facing me when you speak.”

Bucky’s confused look only deepens. “Why?” he asks.

“I’m deaf,” Clint deadpans. 

Bucky doesn’t seem to get why Clint thinks this entire interaction is funny. 

“But you can hear me.”

“The hearing aids help me out, and I can read your lips. I’m deaf.”

“But you’re still an agent? How?”

Clint sighs. This is very suddenly not fun anymore. He takes a deep breath before launching into the abridged version of how he lost his hearing. “A while back there was this guy me and another agent were up against. He had this machine that was getting in our heads, setting us up to tear each other apart. He turned it off for a second, so we’d see what we were doing to each other. While he had it off, I stuck a sonic arrowhead in my mouth. Broke the machine’s control on me, so I could get myself and the other agent out safely, took eighty percent of my hearing with it. Took me a bit to adjust, but I was still one of their best agents, so they adjusted too.”

Clint shrugs. In the grand scheme of things? It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, actually. Not pleasant. Not a fond memory. But not the worst. His deafness is a part of him now. It’s just who he is. 

“How do you do it?” Bucky asks, softly enough that Clint has to really pay attention to his lips as he speaks. 

“My sunglasses. S’why I wear them all the time. I can’t really hear over comms so much, so if anyone has to say anything to me, it goes through Stark or Rhodes. Their heads-up-displays can broadcast video of them speaking to my sunglasses, so I can read their lips. Otherwise, I just operate the best I can on whatever I can pick up.” Honestly, Clint can count on one hand the number of times he’s been really, truly grateful for Tony Stark. He likes the guy, would consider him a good friend. But there are few times he can think of when he’s had absolutely no issue with him, not a single complaint. Number one on that list is when Tony had linked his sunglasses to HUD video, and made an altered version of the tech for his handlers at S.H.I.E.L.D.. It was like a godsend, in all honesty. Clint doesn’t go anywhere without his sunglasses, most days now. 

“You took your own hearing and risked being terminated to get another agent to safety?”

Clint has the distinct feeling that terminated means something to Bucky than it does to him, and that this conversation would not be happening if it were any time other than the middle of the night. 

“She was a friend. There was more to it than just the two of us, but I probably would’ve done it if it was just for her too. If Fury had decided that that was the last straw after all of the other bullshit I’ve pulled over the years, I would’ve been surprised, but I would’ve figured something else out. Run away to join the circus or something.” He laughs at his own joke, though he knows Bucky won’t get it. He thinks it’s funny enough for the both of them. 

Bucky’s silent for a long moment. “I was just gonna ask you what that is that you do with your hands when you talk.”

Clint actually does laugh then, the kind of laugh that doesn’t make any noise but shakes his shoulders. “It’s American Sign Language. It’s probably changed a bit since you and Rogers were youngins,” Clint says with a snort, “but it’s the same basic principle. We use it on mission sometimes, if we need to be quiet, and I have a bad habit of losing or breaking my hearing aids, so it comes in handy then too.” Then Clint takes a risk and he’s not too certain why he takes it. “It helps on nights like this too. When really talking’s hard. I can teach you a bit, if you want. I mean, I’ve just become available for the next four weeks.”

Bucky makes a non-committal noise and shrugs with just his right shoulder. “Maybe.”

Clint lets sleeping dogs lie, on that front. 

“Is Yana asleep? You usually don’t let her out of your sight,” Clint observes. 

Bucky tenses minutely, but still nods in response to Clint’s question. “She’s asleep. Stark gave me this,” Bucky says, raising his flesh hand. There’s a StarkTech watch around his wrist. “Lets me track heat signatures in my quarters. Doors are locked. Windows are secure. She is safe.”

“Good to know. I like the kid, she grows on you fast.”

Bucky’s eyes get very far away at Clint’s words, and Clint thinks he may have just fucked up very badly. And then Bucky just sighs and finally picks up the mug Clint brought in for him. He drinks most of it in one sip. “Yeah. She does. She got me like that too. I wasn’t gonna keep her at first. I was gonna find somewhere good for her to go, but then I spent a couple days towing her around and now she’s the most important thing to me.”

Clint smiles at that, a small but genuinely happy one. Good. Bucky seems like he deserves something good in his life.

“People can grow on you in odd ways. I mean, I never thought I’d be friends with the guy whose brother took control of my mind, but here I am living right down the hall from him whenever he stops by Earth.”

Bucky freezes. 

Clint freezes too. 

“You’ve… had someone inside your head too?” Bucky asks tentatively.

Clint develops a sudden interest in the string of his teabag. “For a bit, a few years ago. Do you know Thor? Yeah, his brother Loki was on a world domination like every other two-bit bad guy. He had me caught up like a puppet on strings. It wasn’t for long, but it wasn’t a fun few days.”

“I know the feeling,” Bucky says with a humorless laugh. 

They lapse into silence again. Bucky’s watch goes off, and he jerks fully upright, tapping at it to see the little dot that is Yana moving. It looks like she’s probably just getting up to use the bathroom, but Bucky quickly excuses himself to check on her. 

Clint doesn’t try to stop him. He doesn’t get much more sleep that night, but the sleep he does get is peacefully devoid of dreams. He wakes up half convinced that his entire interaction with Barnes had been imagined. 

The half-full mugs still on the coffee table that morning are the only thing that lets him know it was real.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> steve's avoiding bucky, bucky's not doing so hot, and clint is suddenly a team therapist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> clint is very suddenly a far bigger part of this story than i anticipated him being. oh well.   
> bucky has an episode of some sort in this chapter, so look out.
> 
> onward.

Steve is maybe avoiding Bucky. 

Okay, not maybe. He is definitely avoiding Bucky. 

Look, he feels awful for it, but he’s also so entirely out of his depth here that he has no idea what to do. It’s nothing he could have ever prepared for and everything he’s feared would happen all wrapped up into one supremely shitty situation. 

It’d be one thing if it were just Bucky, dealing with everything he’d been through. That’d be horrible, but manageable. They all had their own demons to wrestle. Bucky’s would be different, how couldn’t they be, but they’d still be something familiar. With Yana in the mix, though, things are different. Steve doesn’t understand Bucky’s relationship with Yana at all. He doesn’t understand why he’s so protective of a child he had no say in creating, or how Yana’s really processing whatever time she spent with HYDRA, or really how Bucky’s handling anything besides the fact that he’s handling it all badly.

Steve’s just confused. He doesn’t like not knowing. 

Yeah. He’s in over his head. 

He feels even worse for leaving Bucky to his own devices but Steve just doesn’t know what to do. He’d gotten Bucky here, but he’d been so focused on how to do that in the first place that he never really planned ahead, never thought about where to go from there. He always did have a bad habit of jumping in head first without a plan. 

It seems to be doing Bucky good to have Clint around, and Steve’s glad for it, glad that someone can be there for Bucky where he’s obviously failing.

Ever since he’d gotten back from his mission, it was common to find Bucky and Clint in a common area of the compound, with Yana somewhere close by. She entertains herself with anything she can get her hands on--last Steve saw, she had one of Clint’s arrows, the arrowhead missing, and she was using to pretend to be a wizard--while Clint seems to be teaching Bucky sign language. 

It’s nice that Bucky’s got something to distract himself with, though it does tug at Steve’s heart to watch Bucky struggle with his metal arm on bad days. Yana had said that Bucky’s arm sometimes acted up after he had nightmares, or that he stopped himself from using it as often in their wake. 

Steve’s a light sleeper, and he’s gotten in the habit of waking with Bucky’s nightmares and going to keep Yana company if they’ve woken her too, getting her calmed and back to sleep. 

But the past few nights have been quiet. He hasn’t been woken, and Yana hasn’t given any indication that Bucky’s been having bad nights. 

Yet, still, for the past four days, whenever Steve’s run into Bucky, he’s seemed stiff, like his arm isn’t cooperating. But he hasn’t brought it up to anyone, so Steve assumes he’s just been refraining from using it for his own reasons. Steve’s thinking that maybe it might be time to broach the idea of Bucky speaking to a therapist when he walks into the common area to find Bucky holding a knife, and Yana hiding behind Clint’s legs. Clint’s got his eyes locked on Bucky, one hand out in a placating gesture, the other caught in Yana’s grip. His gaze doesn’t even flicker towards Steve when he enters the room. 

“Cap, you need to leave,” Clint says very calmly. The plates in Bucky’s arm shift. Clint doesn’t flinch. “Now,” Clint all but growls. 

Steve leaves. 

~*~

The second Steve leaves, Clint focuses his attention entirely on Bucky again, 

“Hey Barnes, it’s just us again, yeah? Come on buddy, what happened?” 

Clint knows what happened. Yana had been flipping through TV channels and had just so happened to pause just too long on some channel playing  _ Saving Private Ryan _ , and suddenly the sound of gunfire was coming through the TV. 

It was loud enough that Clint could hear it clearly and he tensed, before realizing it was just the TV, but Bucky hadn’t recovered as easily as Clint had. He had snapped to attention, Clint didn’t even know where the knife came from. Yana leapt to her feet immediately as soon as it had been drawn, grabbing Clint’s hand and telling him they needed to leave and go somewhere else until her dad was better. 

So this had happened before. Not surprising, really. The fact that Bucky had PTSD to some degree was fairly obvious to Clint, but he was hoping that they’d avoid something like this, at least around Yana. He couldn’t imagine that Bucky enjoyed it very much, and Clint is certainly not having a good time doing this. Yana seems terrified, and how couldn’t she be? Her father is pointing a knife at them. 

“Kiddo, what do you usually do when this happens?” Clint asks softly, not taking his eyes off Bucky. 

“I go to my room and when he’s okay, he has a special knock that he does,” Yana says, just loud enough for him to make out, tightening her grip on Clint’s hand. She tugs at his arm. “Come on, Mr. Barton, we gotta leave.”

Clint stays put. “We’re just gonna stay really calm, yeah? I know this is scary, but it’s going to be fine, okay?” 

Yana shuffles a little further behind Clint, just barely peeking her head around his legs. 

“Bucky,” Clint tries again. Bucky’s upper lip curls into a snarl and he stalks forward. “Barnes, come on, this isn’t you, man.”

Bucky does not listen. He steps closer again, flipping the knife in his hand to get a better grip on it. Yana yelps and ducks fully behind Clint. 

In a last ditch effort, Clint shoves Yana behind a couch to get her out of the way, just in case, and takes a step forward himself. He’s almost chest to chest with Bucky. 

“уступать, Soldat,” he commands in a low, deadly calm tone. Bucky freezes where he stands. “Дай мне нож.” 

Bucky gives him the knife, and stands at attention, staring dead-eyed at something just over Clint’s head. Clint takes a deep breath. 

“Don’t move,” he says, and he kneels to help Yana back to her feet. “You okay honey? You didn’t get hurt right?” he asks, giving her a once over just to be safe. 

She shakes her head. “I’m okay.” 

“Good. Why don’t you go into the kitchen and wait for Natasha? She’ll come and make you some hot chocolate, how’s that sound? I’ll make sure your dad is okay,” he promises. After a moment’s hesitation and a glance over the back of the couch at Bucky, Yana nods in agreement. Clint sends her on her way. “FRIDAY,” he starts, and the AI interrupts him. 

“I’ve already taken the liberty of calling Miss Romanoff to the kitchen, Mr. Barton. Would you like me to call Captain Rogers as well?” 

“No, just, make sure everyone else stays away from here for a bit. I know what I’m doing.”

“If you say so, sir,” FRIDAY responds, and Clint would almost say she sounds sarcastic. 

The knife gets placed on a table on the other side of the room and Clint takes a seat in a chair. He tells Bucky to sit in the one opposite him, and he does. 

“Your name,” Clint starts, leaning his elbows onto his knees, “is James Buchanan Barnes. You are Steve Rogers’ best friend. You’re my friend. You are a father. So I want you to think about all of that for a minute, and when something clicks, Barnes, I want you to tell me exactly what the fuck just happened.”

“Affirmative,” Bucky says, mechanically, like he’s on autopilot. His eyes still look dead. 

They sit in silence for a long moment before something seems to spark in Bucky’s eyes. 

“What did I do?” he asks in a raspy voice, like he’s been swallowing sandpaper. He looks up then, and his eyes dart around wildly before fixing on Clint. “Where’s Yana? Where’s my daughter?” 

Clint holds up a hand. “She’s fine. She’s okay, Barnes. I sent her to the kitchen with Natasha, so we could have a chat. You didn’t hurt her. Relax.” 

Bucky does not relax.

“What did I do?”

“Yana was flipping through channels and landed on a war movie. You heard the gunfire from the TV and it triggered something. You pulled a knife, I got Yana out of the way, told you to cool it. You didn’t listen. I told you to cool it in Russian. You listened. Here we are. All good, yeah?” Clint says with a half smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“Why didn’t you run?”

Clint shrugs. Yana had told him to leave. He probably should have. Never let it be said that Clint Barton has a good sense of self-preservation. 

“I did this a lot with Natasha, when I first brought her in. There was still a little bit of the Red Room in her head for a long while. And I’d disobeyed direct orders to bring her in, so she was my responsibility.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Natalia was not an asset like me.”

“No, but there were still things that people would say that would make her react in less than ideal ways. She damn near killed me more times than I could count. But I got good at some Russian words, and I got good at talking her down from whatever was going on in her head. Figured it’d work for you.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “And if that hadn’t worked?”

“Cognitive recalibration.” Clint thinks this is a very funny joke. Bucky, obviously, does not get why it makes Clint laugh. “I would’ve hit you really hard in the head.”

Bucky almost smiles then. It’s not quite there, but it’s better than the sullen look he’d been sporting moments earlier. Bucky goes quiet then, though, and Clint sighs. 

“How often does this happen?” he asks. 

Bucky shrugs his right shoulder. “I don’t really remember. Maybe four time in the past month or so.”

So not the worst it could be, but not really great either, especially when they were trying to prove that he’s not dangerous, and when he’s trying to raise a daughter.

“Look, Bucky. You’ve been through a lot of shit. And with Stark’s lawyers coming in to talk to you soon, that’s only gonna get worse. I think you should let Steve or Stark or someone find a trustworthy therapist.” Bucky opens his mouth and Clint shoots him a look. “No. Before you say it, you’re not fucking fine. You’re fucked up. This isn’t going away. Consider getting ahead of it.” Clint gets up then and hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “Take a minute, breathe, then go show your kid you’re okay. I’m going to find Steve.”

Bucky nods once, and then Clint’s gone. If Bucky calls after him, Clint doesn’t hear it.

~*~

When Clint finds him, Steve’s in the gym drenched in sweat and beating a hole through a punching bag. His first victim already lies in a mess on the floor beside him. Another spare rests on his other side. Clint comes in and perches on that one, and Steve pays him very little attention until he snaps the chain on the bag in front of him and sends it crashing into the wall. 

“How’s he doing?” he asks, before he even turns to look at Clint. 

“In the kitchen with Nat and Yana. He’s fine. Yana’s fine. I’m fine. Crisis averted.” 

Steve lets out a breath he’d hardly realized he was holding. 

“Thank god.”

“No, thank me. God had nothing to do with that. I did that.”

Steve chokes on a laugh and leans against the wall. After a second he sighs and slides down the wall until he’s sitting, his knees almost pulled to his chest. He’s sure he looks ridiculous like this, but he doesn’t particularly care. He’s certain Clint doesn’t either. 

“I told him he should see a therapist,” Clint says to break the silence. Steve raises an eyebrow. “What? It helps. I don’t know how it was before you went on ice, Cap, but brainwashing like Barnes went through is not going to fix itself on his own. I can talk to him all I want and we can be good friends to him, but he needs real, professional help. S.H.I.E.L.D. may be gone but I can probably hunt down the shrink I talked to after New York.”

That makes Steve pause. “After New York?”

“Yeah. After a Norse god shoved his way into my head and made me kill a bunch of my friends, I needed some fucking therapy, Steve.”

That shuts Steve up very quickly. He studies Clint for a second and then sighs heavily. 

He recalls a story he read once, about the Titan Atlas who carried the weight of the world on his back. He wonders if this is even a fraction of what Atlas felt, and if it is, how did he make himself keep living. 

He wonders how Clint does it, too. How he gets up every morning with all that weighing on his shoulders. 

“Clint, I’m sorry,’ Steve says, his shoulders slumping in defeat. 

Clint shakes his head. “Don’t apologize.”

“I should at least thank you then. You’ve been doing a lot for Bucky since I brought him back. A lot more than I have been. It means a lot.”

“I should start a club. ‘Mind-Control Victims Anonymous’, except not anonymous, cause all of them are my friends. You ever hear of that girl Jessica Jones down in New York? I should make friends with her too. Oh, and I can invite Helen Cho. It’ll be a party. We can have wine and fancy cheese.” 

Steve can’t help but snort at that. The smile it brings to his face fades rather quickly though. 

“Clint, I don’t know what to do. I thought I could handle this but I’m so out of my depth here. I want to help him, but I don’t know how, and it’s not like I can ask him, cause I don’t think he knows what he needs either.”

“No, he doesn’t, because up until you and Nat brought down HYDRA, he didn’t even know he was allowed to need or want things. Mind-control is fucky and whatever they did to him is even more complicated cause he doesn’t remember anything. For better or worse, I remember everything I did under Loki’s control. Barnes doesn’t even get that. He’s floundering.”

Steve throws his hands up in exasperation, his arms coming down to rest on his bent knees. “I know that! I just don’t know how to help!”

Clint nods. “I felt that way when I first brought Natasha in. Red Room wasn’t as psycho nuts with the mind control but they were super into brainwashing. Took me a while to help her out of her worse habits. I figured it out on the fly.”

“We don’t have that kind of leeway here though. Nat had S.H.I.E.L.D. at her back to get her pardoned. We don’t have anyone except for Stark’s legal team doing their best to get his name cleared.”

Clint pulls a face. “Yikes. Sticky situation. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

“It seems impossible.”

“Never thought you to be a pessimist oh Captain, my Captain.”

“What?” 

“You have to watch  _ Dead Poets Society _ . Great movie. Also, not the point. Point is, you’re being a real downer, Steven. It’s unlike you. I can’t imagine this is real easy on you either, so maybe you should find someone to talk to, too. Preferably a real therapist who can help you cope with everything going on in your old brain. You can’t fix anyone else if you’re broken too.”

“I’m fine, Clint,” Steve insists. 

“Steve, I’m deaf, not stupid. I see you wandering around the compound at night and going on runs at four in the morning and nearly falling asleep in your lunch. The insomnia, the nightmares, the fatigue, this notion that you’re responsible for everything that happens to everyone? Those are all symptoms of PTSD. I’m not saying you’ve for sure got that, but Cap, you are not okay.” Clint stresses the end of that sentence a lot. Steve shrinks under his gaze. For once in his life, he has absolutely no urge to fight back. “Don’t think that just cause your trauma is different it’s invalid. Christ, when did I become the sensible one on this team?”

Steve is quiet for a long time. 

“You’re not alone,” Clint says finally. “It took me a long time to figure that one out for myself too. You’ve got this team, and we all care about you like you’re family. Work on yourself, and maybe along the way you’ll figure out how to help Barnes. But for now, you’ve got the rest of us to help you both out.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter an assortment of sort of strays, collect by one clint barton.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is a little bit shorter than the others because it's just a bit of a bridge between the previous chapter and the next one, but here we go!

Clint ends up tracking down the woman he saw in the aftermath of Loki’s mind control, a young woman who was really only supposed to be interning with S.H.I.E.L.D. medical when Clint had requested her specifically. He’d wanted someone as far removed from S.H.I.E.L.D. as possible, someone who had some distance from him and the other agents and the entire New York debacle. The doctoral intern seemed like a good bet. She turned out to be fantastic at her job in a way Clint could never have expected. They still do Skype sessions once every few weeks or so. 

Doctor Nadia Holloway is very easy to track down. She’s a shrink for the FBI or the CIA or something now, Clint doesn’t pay much attention. A quick negotiation and a substantial pay raise later and suddenly, the Avengers have a full time therapist, and Clint is on his way to New York City to retrieve her. 

Stark’s legal team is coming in the next day to have an initial meeting with Barnes, get as much information as they can from him, all the stuff that’s not in the HYDRA files, so they can begin to mount their defense. Nadia will be coming in just in time. Clint has a feeling a few people, namely Steve, will need someone to talk to after that all goes down. Clint is usually not wrong about this sort of thing. 

While he’s in New York, he has a fantastic idea. 

Clint returns to the compound that evening with Nadia Holloway. 

He also returns with Matthew Murdock, attorney at law, and a dog named Lucky. 

~*~

One very high tension video call with Tony Stark later, all attention turns to the dog. 

“Clint, that dog looks like he’s half made of fleas.” Natasha says the second Stark’s video goes out, and then she’s out of the room, ushering Nadia towards the guest quarters. Steve wants to laugh, but he also thinks there’s a strong chance she’s right, if Cint picked this dog up off the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. 

“No, Pizza Dog just needs a bath,” Clint says, and Bucky actually laughs. 

A real laugh, one that shakes his shoulder, and makes his eyes go all squinty. Steve’s heart swells. It’s short lived, but he’s thrilled. That was a glimpse of the real Bucky,  _ his _ Bucky. 

“You named your dog Pizza Dog?” Bucky asks.

“Dad, can I pet him?” Yana asks enthusiastically. 

“No. Not until he’s clean.”

“His name’s Lucky, and he’s staying here whether Stark likes it or not. He’s blind in one eye and I think he’s got a bum leg, but he’s perfect,” Clint states assertively. 

“Did a child just call Mr. Barnes ‘Dad’?” Murdock asks and Steve decides to split this party up. 

“Clint, go wash your dog,” he orders, though there’s no real weight behind his words. 

Yana, as Steve expected she would, asks, “Dad, can I help Mr. Barton give Lucky a bath?”

Bucky sighs and agrees and trudges along after the two of them as they head towards the personal quarters to bathe the pizza dog. 

“It’s coming to my attention that there is more to this than Clint let on when he approached me,” Murdock says with a sigh. “It’s Captain Rogers, right?”

“Just Steve is fine, Mr. Murdock. Can I get you something? Coffee? Water? A shot or six?” Steve jokes. He’s only half joking. Nothing serious has to be done until the next afternoon. He’d probably give the lawyer whatever he asked for. 

“Then you’ll have to call me Matt. And a cup of tea would be very nice, if you’ve got it,” Matt says.

“This way to the kitchen,” Steve says, and walks away, turning in surprise when Matt doesn’t follow. 

“I’m sorry Captain, but you may have to guide me there. I’m not familiar with this building.” There’s a beat, and then he explains further. “Clint must not have mentioned it. I’m blind.”

Steve wants to smack himself. “Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. Come on,” he says, offering his arm. 

Steve helps Matt to the kitchen and sets a kettle to boil and sags onto a stool across from the lawyer. 

“Do you think you could explain the situation with the child a little more clearly to me?” Matt asks. Steve’s stomach sinks. Almost like Matt can sense Steve’s worry, he says, “I made an agreement to help Sergeant Barnes. I’ll honor that. I just want to have an idea of what’s going on here before I meet with him and the rest of Stark’s team tomorrow.”

Steve takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “Don’t we all. I’m sure you’ve heard all about the Winter Soldier on the news since the file leak. Sam Wilson and I have been looking for Bucky since I found out he was still alive, when we took down S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA. He broke out of their control, and went on the run. We finally found him a couple weeks ago, with Yana, the little girl you asked about.”

“The one calling him ‘Dad’.”

“Yes. She’s his daughter. Someone in HYDRA got a DNA sample and decided to play god. They created Yana in a lab, without Bucky’s knowledge. He remembered hearing about it and found her after the incident at the Triskelion. She’s about to turn six, and she’s, at this point, spent more than half her life in a HYDRA facility, and the rest of it on the run. Buck’s real protective of her.”

“I would only assume so. The fact that he has a daughter may complicate things, but it may help his case as well. We’ll have to get all of the facts that we can from Sergeant Barnes first, of course, but I am confident that there is something here. We’re not just grasping at straws, we have a basis for our defense. It won’t be easy, but don’t look so dejected.” Matt smiles at his own joke and Steve can’t help but smile too. 

The kettle whistles. Steve busies himself preparing tea for a minute, only pausing to ask Matt how he takes his. After a long silence, Steve sets a mug in front of Matt and speaks. 

“Matt, I appreciate your agreeing to help. I’ve heard a little about the work you do, helping people down in Hell’s Kitchen. I know you’re good at dealing with hard cases, but this is going to be very difficult. With everything Bucky’s gone through, it’s all going to be very heavy. Are you sure you’re up for this? None of us would be upset if you wanted to walk away from this. We didn’t even know Clint was bringing you up here.”

“I gathered as much. But I knew I was getting into something messy the second Clint said ‘Winter Soldier’. Mr. Barnes has been in the news a lot recently. From what I’ve heard, it seems he didn’t have much of a choice in what happened to him. I’ve seen too many innocent people dragged into dangerous and impossible situations. I help people like that. I’m happy to help here, too,” Matt assures, and Steve breathes a sigh of relief. Stark’s legal team is good, but Steve’s heard about what Matt and his partner Foggy accomplished in Hell’s Kitchen. That sort of perspective could make a world of difference here, and they need all the help they can get. 

“I’ll see to it that you’re afforded the same fee as Stark’s legal team. I’ve heard you take a lot of pro-bono cases, and something's got to keep the lights on, right? You’ll have more than earned it, by the end of this,” Steve says, leaving little room for argument. 

“That’s very kind of you, Steve.”

And they sit and drink their tea in silence. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter the stark legal team

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a very heavy chapter, as it involves bucky detailing his past to the lawyers. please be careful.

Bucky hates the dog already. 

He has known the Pizza Dog for less than a day, and he hates the damn thing. Lucky had soaked him down to the bone while Yana and Clint bathed him the day before, he’d knocked Bucky’s mug off the coffee table that night, and he’d nosed his way into Bucky’s room before the door shut and refused to leave. 

All of that aside, Bucky wakes up in the morning to the dog on his chest, and feeling more rested than he can ever remember feeling. 

Maybe the dog isn’t so bad. 

Bucky still hates the dog, don’t get him wrong, but maybe the dog isn’t terrible. 

He’s grateful for the restful night, at the very least. He is not looking forward to this day, whatsoever. The past few weeks have been what Bucky would almost call peaceful. He hasn’t had to worry about looking over his shoulder every two seconds, he was finding he could actually enjoy some things, like the books Steve gave him, or the TV shows Clint showed him, or the games Yana came up with, or learning sign language. He feels a sense of security here that he hasn’t felt in a long time. 

That’s not to say he’s relaxed. He’s not. He feels high strung as ever. But the Avengers Compound has felt almost like a break from reality, an escape. 

Everything is about to come crashing back down to earth. 

Bucky is awake before everyone else that morning, the damned mutt wandering around after him as he goes through the motions of making breakfast and putting on a pot of coffee. 

To make himself feel useful, he cooks for more than just himself, knowing that at least Steve and Sam will be up soon, military internal clock for Sam, maybe nightmares for Steve, he’s not sure. Either way, they’ll be awake soon enough, and Clint will stumble in for caffeine a little while after. Natasha will come in around the same time as Clint, and Rhodey will follow, usually fresh from the shower after a quick morning workout. Vision never deigns to join them for meals, so he falls to the back of Bucky’s mind. Two cups of coffee in, Clint will rinse his mug out and go to wake up Wanda if she hasn’t shown herself yet, and then Bucky will finish his breakfast, and he will go wake Yana, and get her dressed and ready for the day and then get dressed himself. 

Things go exactly according to the schedule Bucky has mapped out in his head, though today, they are joined by Nadia Holloway and Matt Murdock, who come in with Natasha. Nadia registers as no threat when Bucky gives her a once over, but something about Murdock still sits uneasy with Bucky, though he can’t quite pinpoint what it is. 

Clint goes to put his mug away and wake Wanda, and Bucky leaves to rouse his daughter. 

Stark had sent out a personal shopper, because that was apparently a thing that some people had, to pick up some new things when he and Yana had first arrived, and Yana was thrilled with all of the new options she had for clothing. Bucky was not, it was overwhelming, having so many choices, but he wouldn’t say that to her. Anything that made her happy, he would deal with. He’s almost glad for the new selection though, for today, so he can wear pants that aren’t worn through at the knees and a nice shirt and look at least semi-presentable for these lawyers. 

Yana’s sluggish getting ready today, and Bucky worries that she’s having nightmares again, but she doesn’t mention it, and his mind’s racing so fast, fears and doubts and confusion making a mess of his thoughts and causing his concern to be shoved to the back of his mind. 

He’s more worried about the fact that he’ll be away from Yana all day. He should be okay with that, she’s almost six, she should be in school, where she’d be away from him for a lot of the day every day, but it makes something heavy press on his chest to think about having her out of his sight.

His brain tells him that out of sight means in danger, and he tells it that no, she’ll be with Clint, she’ll be fine, but his brain does not stop repeating that. 

Today is already turning south and he hasn’t even laid eyes on a suit yet. He sends Yana into the bathroom to brush her teeth and tries to steady his nerves as he pulls on a nice pair of black jeans and a maroon button down shirt. His instincts tell him to keep the sleeves down, hide his arm, but there’s no sense in that. These lawyers should know the shitstorm they’re jumping into. He rolls the sleeves up. After a moment of debating with himself, he pulls his hair back into a messy bun, so that it doesn’t hang in his face. 

He looks at himself in the mirror for a split second, all he can really handle. He’s presentable. Yana comes out of the bathroom. 

Clint is waiting when they leave their quarters, and Bucky’s breath catches in his chest. He feels like he’s walking to his execution, rather than to a simple meeting. 

“Stark and Murdock are waiting for you in the conference room with the rest of the suits. Steve and Nat are on standby if you want either of them in the room with you.” Clint smiles down at Yana and ruffles her hair before adding, “Take a breath, Barnes. This is just a meeting. Everyone in that room is on your side, no matter what happens. It’s gonna be fine. I’ll see you later.”

Bucky hears him, doesn’t believe him, nods anyway. 

He trudges towards the conference room like a dead man towards the gallows. Despite Clint’s reassurances, he can still feel an imaginary noose tightening around his neck. 

True to Clint’s word, Steve and Natasha are hovering outside the conference room with Stark and Murdock. Bucky’s metal arm seizes and a spark of pain shoots through his chest. He ignores it. The arm has been acting up lately, but he’s fine, still operational, so it doesn’t matter. 

“John Kasowitz, Brian Cohn, and Allie Edwards, the best lawyers in the country,” Stark introduces as they step into the room where the sharks are waiting. “Gentlemen, Miss Edwards, this is Sergeant James Barnes. Now I’m just here for the introductions, so I’ll be going. Holler at FRIDAY if you need anything. Best of luck, all of you.”

And then Tony is gone. 

“Sergeant Barnes, we’re going to be asking some questions that, due to the nature of your case, may get very personal, and intensive. You’re welcome to have Miss Romanoff and Captain Rogers here if you’d like, but you can do this with just us as well, it is up to you,” Murdock says, and Bucky finds it easier to focus on him than any of the other lawyers. The set of Murdock’s mouth gives away some of his emotion, but with his darkened glasses, Bucky doesn’t have to see the pity he sees in all the others’ eyes. 

“Just Steve,” Bucky says after a long minute of deliberation. Natasha leaves without a word. “Just in case something goes south.”

The woman, Edwards, speaks first, once Natasha is gone, and Bucky, Steve and Murdock have taken their seats. Bucky sits on one side of the table, opposite the panel of lawyers, with Steve at his left, just out of reach. Good. The arm may giving him trouble, but being cautious never hurt.

“Sergeant Barnes, we’re here today to begin to understand what we’re working with for your case. This situation is unlike anything anyone has seen before, and with the extent of everything that has to be covered, it’s likely to drag on for a while. You’re being formally charged with twenty-nine counts of first degree murder, treason, and sixty-one counts of manslaughter. It sounds like a lot, but don’t let that get to you. We’re good at our jobs. If you trust us to do them, and give us all of the information you can so we can prepare for every situation, this will all go very smoothly.

“Now. Sergeant Barnes, can you start with telling us everything you can about after you fell from that train?”

Bucky’s chest seizes and the arm sends three consecutive jolts of pain through him and he grits his teeth at an onslaught of unwanted memories. 

“I survived because of whatever bastardized version of Steve serum they pumped into me while I was in that first HYDRA base during the war, and they found me at the bottom of that cliff, missing most of my arm and half dead. I remember that clearly. About the only thing that’s clear.”

Kasowitz, Cohn and Edwards are scribbling frantically as they listen. Murdock just seems to be focusing his attention on Bucky, but it doesn’t make Bucky squirm the way attention usually does. Maybe it’s because he’s not staring, just listening to what Bucky has to say. He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s glad for it. 

Murdock gently prompts him. “So you had lost your arm prior to HYDRA finding you?” 

Bucky nods, then remembers the guy’s blind and forces himself to speak. “I lost part of it. They took the rest of it, so they could fuse the metal one into my shoulder. Made it stronger, hooked it into me better. I think I remember being awake for part of it.” 

Edwards pauses her scribbling at that, and nods once solemnly. She places her pen down, while Cohn and Kasowitz keep taking their notes. 

“Is that the next thing you remember, after being taken in?” she asks in a gentle tone, like she’s afraid he’ll shatter if she speaks to forcefully. 

Bucky doesn’t appreciate the kid gloves. 

“I know there was more in between there. But it’s all too old, too fuzzy. None of it was important. I didn’t do any of the bad stuff then. It was just blank walls and metal bars and medical tables for a while.”

At his side, Steve tenses. Bucky wonders if he should have sent him away. 

“What happened after you received the… prosthetic?” Edwards prods. “What’s the next thing you remember?”

“The machine.”

“What machine?”

“It was like putting my brain in a blender,” Bucky says in a haunted voice. He’s hit with a sudden flash of memory and he has to take a moment to suck in a sharp breath and get himself under control. He’s fine. He’s not there anymore. He’s with Steve and the rest of his stupidly selfless friends who are all jumping through hoops to help him. He’s as close as he can get to safe. 

“Do you want to take a break Sergeant Barnes?” Kasowitz asks.

Bucky shakes his head. 

“I’m fine,” he insists. “There was a machine that they used, whenever I came out of cryo, or if they wanted to reset me, or wipe me, or whatever they called it. They’d strap me in, and these plates would come down over my head, my face.” Bucky’s gripping the arms of his chair so hard he’s certain they’ll break. “And then they would electrocute me until I couldn’t think and they’d say the words. And they’d do it again and again and again and again.” 

Bucky cuts himself off before he can spiral with the memory.  _ The man on the bridge I knew him, you met him on an assignment earlier this week, but I knew him, wipe him and start over, wipe him, wipe him, wipe him, start over. _

Bucky recognizes that memory. 

He steadies himself with a deep breath. “I don’t know the specifics of the programming, but that machine and a few years of torture and suddenly whenever they said the words, I’d be ready to comply. That’s all I remember of it.”

Cohn speaks up this time. “What words?”

“I’m not telling them to you,” Bucky growls out through clenched teeth. 

“Buck,” Steve interjects, concern laced in his voice. “They just want to know what you mean by words. We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bucky takes a minute to collect himself, to silence the voice telling him _ they’re going to use this against you, they’ll find the book they’ll find the words they’ll find you they’ll find Yana they’ll take your mind away again and make her a monster like you. _

“The command words. Trigger words, I guess,” he says finally. “Ten words that they implanted in my head, somewhere. The machine was to make me forget who I was. The words made me their puppet.”

“So floating out there with the files Black Widow leaked, is a list of words that can turn you back into the Winter Soldier?” Cohn asks, incredulous. 

“No,” Bucky states firmly. “Only my handler and the man who made me had them. My handler’s dead. The words died with him.”

He knows damn well there’s the original hard copy of The Book somewhere out there, but it hasn’t surfaced in years. It’s either lost or well hidden, and like hell he’s telling anyone else that those words still exist. 

It’s not a real lie, just one of omission. 

“So when someone said these words to you, were you aware of what was happening?”

“Vaguely at best,” Bucky says. He’s remembering some of it recently, in dreams and nightmares and horrifying flashbacks. “Even if I could tell what was going on, I had no control of myself. Like riding in the passenger seat in my own body, watching some fucked up version of me run the show. And that was only sometimes. I don’t remember all of it. It’s coming back to me in pieces, but I can’t remember… I had sisters, before. I remember Steve’s mom’s name and that he used to put newspapers in his shoes so they’d fit, but I don’t remember… I can’t remember two of my sisters’ names. I don’t remember what they look like, but I know they existed. I remember a family in Moscow and I remember the son had one eye that had a little bit of blue in it and they had a grey cat, but I can’t remember whether they were an early or a recent hit. My whole life is like that. I only have these pieces left of it, because they took away everything I am and left a monster wearing my face.” Bucky knows he sounds very far away when he’s done speaking, and he is far away, lost in a haunting memory, a car crash he staged and some briefcase that he was meant to steal and the crash didn’t kill them so he did and that one stuck with him, but why? Who was that? Why did he know those people in the car?

“Buck?” Steve’s soft voice hits him like a ton of bricks and Bucky whips around to look at him, suddenly breathing very heavily. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re safe here. We’re just talking. You can take a break if you need. What do you need?”

After a very long moment and a very pained expression, Bucky thinks back to that morning and mutters, “Find the damn dog.”

Steve does. 

Lucky, the stupid mutt, trots into the room on Steve’s heels, and when Bucky whistles, the dog leaps into his lap. 

He is not a lap dog. 

The dog does not move. Bucky arranges himself so the dog doesn’t fall and continues the best he can. He tells the lawyers about the torture and the mind games and the starvation and he tells them about how someone stole his DNA and violated him without ever really touching him by creating a child using it. 

The dog’s weight pressing against his stomach and slumped over his legs is comforting. It lets him get through all of the lawyers’ questions at least. 

It is a very long day. 

At the end of it, as they’re packing up and Lucky is finally climbing down from Bucky’s lap, Edwards says, “You’ve been cleared to stay in Avengers custody until and during trial, due to the unusual nature of this situation. Until the trial officially starts, the knowledge of the trial and the knowledge of your location stays need to know. The existence of your daughter stays need to know. And I know you were likely hoping to avoid it, but there’s a chance the prosecution will want to question her, so begin preparing yourself for us talking to your daughter to prepare her for court, just in case. We’ll be seeing you soon, Sergeant Barnes. Captain Rogers.”

And then they are gone. 

Steve is turning to Murdock to begin some sort of conversation when Bucky slides out of his chair and on to his knees and spirals rather quickly into the worst panic attack he can recall ever having.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a flashback and the aftermath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter deals with bucky having a flashback to first finding out about yana, and injuring another character while experiencing this flashback. take caution.

The second the lawyers are gone, Bucky loses it. 

He’s been holding it together by a thread the whole day anyway, his every day anxieties only made worse by the worries related to revealing everything he remembered about HYDRA using his body to do horrible, despicable things. 

Then Edwards says to prepare Yana to speak to them soon, and something snaps in his mind. 

Suddenly, he’s not in the Avengers’ conference room, he’s standing in the entrance hall to a HYDRA facility and there are a dozen men pointing guns at his chest and not a single goddamn one of them stands a chance. He’s been remembering lately, onslaughts of memories that twist his stomach and make him sweaty and sick, memories of someone who must be his mother smiling at him warmly, memories of SteveSteveSteve and flashes of  _ hedoesn’tknowthegirlexists  _ and  _ who cares if he consented to it? He’s not a person anymore  _ and  _ imagine it, once she’s matured, the two of them will be unstoppable, and there’s no unnecessary familial affection  _ and  _ project light was a success, we’ve created a child from the Soldier’s DNA. _

He remembers it in snippets, two months after HYDRA falls. 

He’s got a daughter and he’s going to save her. He owes her at least that.

He tears through the HYDRA soldiers like paper, ripping into them with his bare hands. They took a part of him and made an entire fucking person with it, and they were going to do the same thing they did to him to this child.

He couldn’t allow that to happen. He barely knows who he is but he knows he has to stop this. 

It takes him too long to find the room with the girl in it, but when he does, he’s so relieved to have found her that he forgets to barricade the door to give himself extra time. He’s ready to do it, to pull out his gun and put a bullet in her head and end it all before they can turn her into a monster like him but then she’s looking up at him with clear blue eyes and then Bucky’s staggering back a step as he’s hit with a memory. A memory of another pair of blue eyes and blond hair and a strong urge to protect and what he thinks is a feeling of safety. He can’t make himself pull his gun. Fine, then. He’ll get the girl out and lie low for a while and then get her to somewhere safe, hand her over to Captain America and his friends, or something. 

“Soldat. I thought I wasn’t s’posed to meet you yet,” the girl says, in halting English. They must just be teaching her the language. 

“Change of plans, kid,” he grumbles, and undoes the restraints holding her to her chair. She can’t be more than four years old. Bucky’s stomach does something funny. 

Something’s not right. 

There’s a man in the door then, with a gun and a tranq and a grim set to his lips. 

“Calm down, Soldier,” he says, as though he can order Bucky around. But that’s not right. No one would ever order him to calm down. They’d tell him to stand down. Something is not right. Something’s wrong. Something’s very, very wrong. The man steps towards Bucky and the girl and Bucky reacts on instinct, lunging for the man. 

He knocks the gun from his hand and crushes the tranq under his boot and wraps his hands around the man’s neck to take him to the ground. 

“Bucky, hey!” the man says, and that’s not right. They didn’t call him Bucky. No one would call him that here, where did the man learn his name?

Bucky draws back his fist and brings it down on the man’s face, again and again, he’s going to stop this man and get the girl out safely, he owes her that much, he won’t let them turn her into a monster, he won’t let them make her like him. He’s going to make this right somehow, he’s going to get them both out safely and get her to someone who can take care of her, he just has to get past this man first, he just has to stop this man who knows his name and is giving him the wrong orders and--

“--rnes! Stop!” Someone’s tugging at Bucky’s shoulders, too big to be the girl, and Bucky elbows them in the face with his metal arm, sending them sprawling. Someone else steps forward and gets a chair thrown at them for the effort. There was no chair there a moment ago. Where did that come from? “James, you need to stop! Stand down!” Bucky draws his fist back to hit the man under him again, to deliver the final blow to render him unconscious so that he and the girl can get out, but someone’s hanging onto it. He can’t swing. He thrashes wildly, connecting with the person’s torso a couple times, but he can’t free his arm. He settles for wrapping his flesh hand around the man’s throat. This is wrong this isn’t how this goes this is what happened. What happened? No. It’s happening now. That’s wrong. This is wrong. This isn’t what happened. It’s not supposed to be happening. It’s not right. It’s not--

“Bucky, that’s enough! You’re going to kill him!”

“Barnes, stand down, or I’ll have to fire.”

“James, let him go.”

“Sergeant Barnes, you’re safe here. You are not wherever your mind has taken you. Try to remember.”

“Dad?”

That’s the final straw. 

Bucky’s mind crashes back together in one overwhelming second and he’s scrambling backwards, away from the man-- _ Steve _ \-- that he had pinned to the floor. 

The scene around him is… not good. 

The dog has long since fled the room. Clint is still sprawled on the ground behind Bucky, his not-cast-covered hand cupped over his right eye. Stark’s got his arms covered in his armor, the repulsors aimed at Bucky’s chest. Natasha’s standing to Bucky’s left side, cradling her left arm to her chest. Murdock is standing half in front of Yana, brandishing his cane like a weapon, a half broken chair at his feet. Yana looks terrified and Steve… 

Steve. 

He’s lying on the floor where Bucky had left him, his eyes half lidded, his breathing heavy. His face is a mess, blood running from the corner of his mouth, little cuts splitting open his forehead and cheekbones. The right side of his face looks… not right. There are bruises blooming on his throat already. Bucky’s breath catches in his chest. 

He’s a monster, he did this to them. 

Clint’s going to have a black eye, Natasha’s shoulder might be dislocated, he threw a chair at his own daughter. He almost killed Steve. 

He looks around at them all, with wide, horrified eyes. 

And Bucky runs.

~*~

Sam gets to the conference room just after Bucky bolts, and is immediately stunned into silence. It takes him a moment to find his voice. 

“FRIDAY said something went down, I came to…” That’s when he sees Steve. “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “That’s where we’re all at too.”

Tony calls for Helen Cho to come to medical immediately. 

Rhodes shows up and escorts Murdock back to the guest quarters. Vision and Wanda show up to start setting the room back to rights. Sam helps Clint get Steve onto a stretcher and Clint and Tony rush him down to medical, Natasha following close behind. Sam turns to the kid, who has been standing off to the side, utterly silent, through the entire ordeal. 

“He didn’t mean to,” she whispers, as soon as Sam looks at her. “He didn’t mean to, I promise he didn’t, please don’t get mad at him!”

Sam crouches to her level and gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “Hey, it’s okay. No one’s mad. I’m sure there’s a reason that this all happened. What happened wasn’t okay, but there’s a lot going on with your dad right now, we understand.”

“You’re not going to punish him?”

That throws Sam for a loop. “What?”

“Mr. Clint said that you all help people, but Dad hurt people, which is disobeying, which means punishment. Please don’t punish him. He didn’t mean to do it. Please don’t hurt him.”

Holy shit, if Sam could just get his hands on whoever made this little girl think like this. “Hey, hey, none of that now. No one else is getting hurt. No one’s getting punished. Everything’s okay. Everyone’s gonna be just fine, I promise you. My friends are pretty tough.”

Yana says nothing, and Sam’s about to suggest they go to the kitchen to start on dinner, as a distraction, when she finally pipes up. 

“Can I go see them? Captain Steve and Miss Nat and Mr. Clint.”

Sam hesitates, Steve looked in rough shape, and Helen probably wants space to check on him, but Clint and Nat seemed fine enough, she can at least see them, if it’ll make her feel better. 

“Come on kiddo,” he says, taking her hand and standing up. 

They wait a little while, Sam doesn’t want to be in the way while Helen’s working, but he does eventually take her down. The trip to medical seems a longer than normal with Yana’s heavy silence. She perks up a little when they get to medical and Clint and Natasha are there, heads bent together in conversation. 

Clint’s got an ice pack held to his face and Nat’s got a sling on her arm, but the nurse is stepping away, into a back room, so Sam assumes they’re alright. 

“Hey sweetheart,” Clint says, a smile spreading across his face as soon as he spots Yana. 

“I’m sorry for what my dad did,” Yana says quietly, and Clint shakes his head and sweeps Yana off her feet for a moment, giving her a hug. 

“Your dad’s my buddy. I’m sure we’ll be able to work it out. Besides. I’m okay. And so’s Nat. A couple of days and the both of us will be good as new. Don’t you worry about us.”

While Clint comforts Yana, Sam pulls Nat aside. 

“How are we looking?”

“Clint’s got an impressive black eye, I’ve got something strained in my shoulder. He’s right, no lasting damage,” Nat explains quickly.

“And Steve?”

“Helen’s saying some minor damage to his larynx and trachea, but he should bounce back from that in a few days, if he takes it easy. A few facial lacerations, which should also fix themselves up quickly with Steve’s enhanced healing. And a broken nose.”

“Is that all?” Sam asks. Steve had stayed down. It took a lot to do that to Captain America. It couldn’t just be--

“Zygomatic fracture, Helen’s thinking,” Nat answers quietly.

“English?”

“She thinks James broke Steve’s cheekbone. They’re running a scan to see how bad the fracture is, and if he’ll need surgery to correct it. He shouldn’t, but even if he doesn’t, it’s going to hurt like a bitch while it heals.”

Sam winces. “What the hell happened?”

“I think James had a flashback. He was muttering in Russian when I came in. He probably thought Steve was someone else.”

Sam just nods. He’s heard just about every PTSD horror story out there, it only makes sense that after seventy years of suffering, Barnes' PTS symptoms would be severe. 

“I’ll talk to Nadia later, give her a heads up so she knows what she’s up against, if she talks to Barnes about this. For now, Yana. Poor kid’s terrified we’re going to hurt Barnes for what happened, for disobeying. I think we should have her talk to Nadia too, if she’s up to it. Not now, obviously, but soon. As much as she acts like a normal kid, there’s still some trauma kicking around in there from whatever HYDRA did to her while they had her.”

Nat just nods in agreement. 

“I know there is.”

They sit there until Wanda finally comes to find them, bringing dinner with her, saying she knew they probably wouldn’t want to leave with Steve still in the private room with Helen and Tony. 

They thank Wanda, and she leaves, and they go back to distracting Yana. 

Tony comes out of the private room, and tells them that the fracture in Steve’s cheekbone isn’t pretty, but he isn’t going to need surgery, though he will need to drink all of his food for the next few days. Sam knows the joking is Tony covering for how concerned he’d been about what had happened to his friend, so Sam doesn’t point out how inappropriate a time it is for that. 

Though they knew Steve would be fine no matter what, this knowledge makes them all relax, just a little bit. With a glance at the time, Sam stands and turns to Yana. 

“It’s getting kinda late, kiddo. How about we go find your dad and start getting you ready for bed.”

Yana looks like she’s floundering for a moment, before she says, “But Captain Steve’s still down here. Can we stay? I don’t wanna go upstairs yet.”

Sam’s chest does something funny then, as he comes to a realization. They end up letting Yana sit on the second cot in the private room with Steve until she falls asleep, and by that time, they’re all so exhausted that none of them move from their chairs to move her to bed. 

Sam doesn’t think he really wants to anyway. 

He’s never had to deal with something like this. Yana, as much as she loves her father, is scared of him. And Sam, as much as he knows Barnes isn’t to blame for his actions, can’t say Yana shouldn’t be afraid.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a discovery, some reassurances, and a decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> missing scene between this chapter and the previous one: matt murdock admitting that he is daredevil to explain how he stopped the chair from hitting yana. also not pictured: lieutenant colonel james rhodes immediately walking away with his hands up in exasperation and wondering how this ended up being his life.
> 
> this chapter deals with yana's treatment at the hands of HYDRA so be careful.

Steve wakes up early the next morning, sweaty and shaking with a nightmare and in excruciating pain. His face feels like it’s on fire, and it’s not until he unclenches his jaw that he finally feels some relief. 

Broken faces, as it turns out, are not fun. 

He glances around the room to check his surroundings. Clint, Natasha, Sam and Tony are still slumped in the chairs they’d passed out in the night before. Yana, at some point in the night, has made her way from the spare cot to his, curled up next his legs like a cat. It makes a smile tug at his lips, which hurts, but her position looks terribly uncomfortable, so he gently prods at her side until she sleepily blinks awake. 

“Hey, kiddo, come here,” he mumbles, and she crawls up the cot, her eyes still half lidded. “Let’s sleep for a little while longer, yeah?” He tucks her under his arm and lets her curl into his side, and she’s asleep before he can even ask her if she’s comfortable. 

He’s asleep not long after. 

~*~

Steve wakes up again to the sound of a phone camera clicking. Tony and Sam are hovering over him with Tony’s phone in Steve’s face. Clint and Natasha have vanished. He hopes that someone’s found Bucky by now, and talked him down from whatever ledge he’s probably got his mind up on. Maybe Clint and Nat went to go do that. He hopes they did at least. If they didn’t, he’ll have to do that himself later, once his head doesn’t feel so cloudy.

“I hope this is a humbling experience for you, Captain Perfect. Now you know what it’s like for the rest of us with normal faces,” Tony jokes, though there’s little humor in his voice. Steve would laugh if it didn’t hurt to move his face like that. 

He smiles as much as he can and attempts to slowly remove his arm from beneath Yana’s head. The action tugs up the short sleeve of her shirt a little bit, and Steve barely pays attention to it, but Sam and Tony’s eyes widen.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Sam mutters, reaching forward slowly, as soon as Steve has extricated himself from underneath Yana. 

Sam very carefully rolls Yana’s left sleeve up to her shoulder, and Steve sees what caught their attention. 

Bucky has a red star marked on his metal arm. Yana has a red star tattooed in the same spot. 

Something rolls in Steve’s stomach. The star takes up most of Yana’s shoulder, too big on her too small body, and it looks so wrong, so brightly colored and unnatural. 

“Stark, get a picture of this while she’s out, in case they want to see it and she’s too uncomfortable to show it off,” Sam whispers, like he can’t believe he has to say this. 

Tony snaps a picture. “They fucking branded her. She’s a child and they branded her like she’s a fucking animal. It’s fucking disgusting,” he mutters. “FRIDAY, upload that picture to a secure remote server and get it off my phone. I don’t want to have to see it again.”

“Yes, sir,” the AI says at a lower volume than normal, almost like she can sense the atmosphere in the room. 

Steve, though he just freed his arm, wraps it back around Yana again protectively. She stirs, and twitches and wakes with a little start, flinching away from Steve before she seems to remember who he is. 

“ _ Good morning _ ,” she mutters in sleepy Russian. She looks confused and then repeats, “Good morning,” in English this time. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… wrong language,” she says, casting her eyes downward. 

Tony, strangely enough, is the first one to reassure her. “Don’t sweat it, Squirt. How do you feel about getting cleaned up and then getting some breakfast?”

Yana puts a hand to her bared shoulder, and rolls her sleeve back down to cover the tattoo. “Will you come with us Steve?”

Steve looks to Tony and Sam. “Helen gave you the okay. She wanted you to stay here to sleep off whatever crazy painkillers she gave you last night, but you’re good to go, as long as you take it easy,” Tony answers Steve’s unspoken question. 

Steve nods to Yana, and lets her climb from the bed before he attempts to stand himself. He’s steady on his feet, though the broken nose is making breathing a bit more of an effort than normal. He figures that, all things considered, he’s lucky.

They go up to eat breakfast, and when they’re all considerably more awake, meaning two cups of coffee for Steve and Sam, and three for Tony, Steve takes Yana back to her and Bucky’s quarters. Bucky is unsurprisingly nowhere to be found, so Steve helps Yana pick out some clothes and waits while she steps into the bathroom to get ready. She showers and gets dressed on her own with startling efficiency, but she does come out of the bathroom holding a comb and little elastics, with a sheepish look on her face. 

“Dad usually does my hair but I don’t know where he is so could you maybe… please, Captain Steve?” she asks, and her expression makes a smile spread across Steve’s face as he nods. 

He remembers sitting with Bucky when they were younger and babysitting Bucky’s sisters while his mom worked, remembers the practicing again and again until the girls were satisfied with their hair, and Steve and Bucky could do just about any hairstyle they asked for. 

So Steve says, “Just call me Steve, kiddo,” and he sits on the bed, and Yana settles in the space just in front of his crossed legs and Steve pulls her hair into two perfect dutch braids, working off of muscle memory that hasn’t been used in decades. 

Yana turns around and hugs him when he’s done, and doesn’t let go. 

“You’re not gonna send me back, right?” she asks in such a quiet voice that Steve barely hears her. 

He hugs her back and runs a hand gently over hair, letting it rest on the back of her neck. He dwarfs her, and he’s suddenly struck with a realization of just how small Yana is. He gets that she’s a child, she’s barely six years old, she’s supposed to be this small, but she’s been acting so maturely the entire time she’s been living at the compound, it’s easy to forget that she’s as young as she is. 

“I know you saw the star and that that means I’m supposed to belong to HYDRA but I don’t wanna go back, I don’t want me and Dad to have to go back, please don’t make us, he didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” she continues when Steve doesn’t respond immediately. “I promise I’ll be good and so will my dad, I promise, Steve.”

Steve pulls away from Yana, smooths a couple of loose baby hairs back from her forehead. “Hey, no. No one’s ever going to let you go back to HYDRA, Yana. We’re going to take care of you. You and your dad are here because we want to help your dad and make sure you’re both safe, okay? You don’t belong to them. You are your own person. You belong to you. You’re not going back there.”

“But you were just saying how much your face hurt to Mr. Sam, before. They had to give you medicine so that it wouldn’t hurt so bad. Why aren’t you mad?”

Steve shifts so that Yana’s sitting on his knee. 

“Honey, your dad and I have been friends for a very long time. He was there for me when I had no one else. And now he needs someone, so me and my friends are going to be there for him. I know he didn’t mean to hurt me. It’s not okay that he did, but I know that there’s something bad in his brain that’s making it hard for him to be the person he wants to be. So I forgive him for what happened, and I’m going to help him work on the bad stuff, so that he can get better,” Steve explains patiently. 

“He’s never been like that before. Sometimes, he looks scary, and he says I’m supposed to just go to my room then and wait until he does the special knock so I know he’s okay, when that happens. He does the wrong knock sometimes, before he does the special one, but he doesn’t ever hurt people,” Yana says quietly. “I didn’t like that.”

Steve runs a comforting hand over Yana’s back, letting it come to rest on her shoulders, in the end. “It’s scary, seeing someone you love not acting like themself, especially your dad. But we’re going to help him get better, so that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

“Do you promise?” 

“Cross my heart,” Steve says, making an ‘X’ over his heart with a finger. 

“And you promise you’re not gonna send us away?”

“Never. You’re staying here for as long as you want to.”

“Okay,” Yana says, after a long moment of deliberation with herself. 

Steve hesitates for a second, and then says, “Hey Yana, do you remember the lady that Clint brought back with him? Miss Holloway?” Yana nods. “Well Miss Holloway is something called a psychiatrist, and her job is to talk to people and she helps them learn how to feel better,” he says, for lack of a better way to explain this to a six year old. “She helps people who have lived through hard things, like all of us, and she’s here right now mostly to help you and your dad. Would you talk to her, if we asked you to?” 

“Do I have to?” she asks tentatively.

Steve shakes his head. “No one will make you do anything you don’t want to. But I think it might be a good idea. You could talk to her about how you felt scared last night, or you could talk to her about what you remember about before your dad came to get you, or anything else. Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone about things like that.”

“Can I try it and stop if I don’t like it?”

Steve nods. 

Yana mirrors the action. “Okay.” 

And isn’t that a weight off of Steve’s chest. At least he can breathe a little easier knowing that Yana will at least try talking to Nadia, and that will be far better than nothing. 

They go hunt down the others after that, finding Wanda and Clint having a conversation in rapid sign language, though Wanda’s is a little jerky. Rhodey looks exasperated, which is understandable after Steve hears about the conversation he had with Murdock, Sam is caught up in a book, Vision is nowhere to be found, and Tony is gone, on a quinjet back to New York City with Murdock, so that Murdock can live his life until the next meeting they have and so Tony can do something with Pepper. 

Steve’s just about to ask about Nat when she and Nadia walk into the room, announcing that their search for Bucky has come up empty. 

Steve makes sure that someone is watching Yana and then goes to begin a search of his own. 

Natasha may be a great spy, but he is Steven Grant Rogers and he knows Bucky Barnes better than anyone, and he thinks they are due for a conversation.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> steve and bucky finally have a conversation. things are still not going well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bucky.... really does not talk about himself kindly in this chapter.

Natasha and Nadia were looking for the Winter Soldier. 

Steve is looking for Bucky Barnes, because that’s who he is right now. He is not the Winter Soldier, the dangerous assassin. He is Bucky Barnes, he is scared, he is likely blaming himself and Steve knows just where he will go. 

Bucky always was good with a lockpick. 

Steve finds Bucky on a roof that Clint frequents when he’s lost in his own head. From the inside the door appears secure, but one push and it gives way and Steve smiles. 

He quickly stops doing that, because  _ OW _ , but he’s still pleased with himself that he was able to find Bucky when even Natasha couldn’t. He still knows his best friend, even after decades of ice and brainwashing and being separated from each other. 

He also sort of wishes he’d grabbed an ice pack. His face is throbbing. 

Bucky is sitting with his legs dangling over the side of the building, his flesh hand gripping the edge of the roof so hard it turns his knuckles white. His metal hand lies limp in his lap. There is a fine tremor running through his entire body. He’s staring at something between his feet, on the ground far below him. He’s sitting in the one spot on this roof that is just out of every security camera’s reach. 

Steve makes sure his boots crunch against the surface of the roof, but Bucky still startles when the door slams shut behind Steve. He leaps to his feet, his metal arm still curled close to his chest, as though he doesn’t trust himself with it still. His eyes blow almost comically wide when he sees that it’s Steve that’s found him.

“What are you doing here? You need to stay away from me,” Bucky says, his voice rough from disuse. 

“I came to have a chat. I think we’re long overdue for a real conversation,” Steve says, his voice hoarse from the damage to his throat. 

Bucky grimaces when Steve speaks, and steps back as far as he can without stepping off of the roof. 

“You shouldn’t be anywhere near me,” Bucky insists again, clutching his metal forearm with his human fingers, his knuckles going white again. His eyes are fixed on something on Steve’s shirt? No. His neck. The bruises on his neck. They’re still an ugly mottled purple in the perfect shape of fingers, matching the black and blue bruises on his face. Steve imagines he must look like a mess, not showered and wearing sweatpants and a shirt he’d tossed on in a hurry after getting Yana ready for the day. 

Still he forges forward, taking a few steps out onto the roof. Bucky’s feet shuffle, as though he wants to step backward but knows he cannot. 

“Yana’s okay. She stayed in medical with me last night, crawled into my cot in the middle of the night, must’ve had a nightmare, but she slept like a rock as soon as she got comfortable. She’s down with the others right now, doing something with Wanda and Clint last I checked. We had a good conversation this morning, she even agreed to try talking to Nadia, to see if it was something she’d like to do. She was a little freaked out by what happened, and because we saw her tattoo while she was asleep, but she seemed better after I talked to her.”

Bucky looks confused, but he doesn’t speak. Steve pushes on, inching toward the elephant in the room. Or. On the rooftop. 

“Clint and Natasha are both okay too. Clint’s just got a black eye and Nat’s got a strained something in her shoulder, but she’ll be back in fighting shape by next week, as long as she takes it easy for now.” 

Steve’s throat is protesting every words that comes out of his mouth, making his voice sound scratchy and strained, but he continues, because if he gives up now, like he’s been giving up every time he’s tried to Bucky since the got him back, then nothing will ever be accomplished. 

“I’m okay too,” he starts, “It’s just some bruises, a broken nose and a minor facial fracture. I’m going to be completely fine in a couple weeks max, with the accelerated healing I have from the--” that’s where Bucky cuts him off.

“I tried to kill you Steve,” Bucky snaps, unable to meet Steve’s eyes. He’s still holding his metal arm close to his chest. “This is the second time I’ve… More than that. There are more times that I tried. I don’t remember them exactly but I know there are more, before the helicarriers and the Potomac, I can feel it with everything I am, and I know that once you realized that it was me beneath that muzzle you stopped trying as hard. I’ve tried to kill you. I shot you and I’ve beaten you within an inch of your life and yesterday I tried to choke you to death and you didn’t fight back. You didn’t fight back, Steve. You would’ve let me kill you for some stupid self-sacrificing reason that I can’t understand and that’s--”

“Bucky, I didn’t fight back, because fighting back would’ve only made things worse. I trust you enough to be able to pull yourself back before that happens. You only got worse when I fought back on the helicarriers and last night you only got worse when Clint and Nat jumped you. I thought talking to you would’ve been better, and it was. You pulled yourself out of it. I trusted you to do that,” Steve says, stepping even closer. 

“You shouldn’t trust me, Steve! Jesus, you and your fucking rose-colored glasses always looking at the positives of things and seeing the best in people. I’m not your Bucky! I’m not him! I’m different! I’ve got his face, but I’m not him! I’m a shell! I’m a monster!”

“Don’t talk that way about yourself, Bucky. And you don’t get to tell me who I should and shouldn’t trust. I trust you. I always have and I always will. You’ve always done the right thing by your friends and--”

“I killed Howard and his wife!” Bucky shouts over the rest of Steve’s sentence, and Steve goes stock still. 

Bucky’s arm seizes and he drops his grip on it. The metal limb hangs heavy at his side, dead weight. It twitches twice and then goes still. Everything is deafeningly silent for a too long moment. 

Steve’s ears ring. 

Bucky killed Howard and Maria? “Buck, they died in a car crash.”

“I ran them off the road for something they had in their trunk. I ran them off the road, and when that didn’t kill them,” Bucky starts stalking forward as he speaks, snarling his words at Steve until he’s right in Steve’s personal space. The heavy dead weight of his arm sets his whole body leaning at an awkward angle, but it doesn’t make Bucky look any less terrifying. Steve almost takes a step back. As it is, he shifts his weight nervously, his face aching as he tries not to clench his jaw. 

“Bucky, come on,” he says softly.

“No. When that didn’t kill them, I beat Howard’s head in with my bare hands. And then, I put this metal hand around his wife’s throat and I watched the life drain out of her eyes and I didn’t care. I murdered them, and then I took what I came for and I got back on my bike and I sped away and I did not give a single fuck that I had just murdered a man I used to call my friend and his wife, who had a fucking son waiting for them to come home. I didn’t care. Because I’m a monster.”

“Bucky, that wasn’t you,” Steve insists. 

“But it was! It was my hands even if it wasn’t my mind! I did that! I tried to kill you last night! I threw a chair at my own daughter’s head! I’m a fucking animal at best, who’s tried to kill you more than once, and you’re sitting here telling me you still spent the night taking care of my kid and that you trust me? You must be fucking nuts, Steve,” Bucky says. By the end of it, it’s like all the fight has left him abruptly. Like all the anger was there only to cover something else. 

To cover the pain. 

It’s only for a split second, but when Bucky says his name, Steve can see raw emotion flashing in Bucky’s eyes. It makes his chest ache, to see his best friend, the man he cares so much about, in so much pain. 

“How long have you known what you did to Howard and Maria?” 

Bucky looks up at Steve like he wasn’t expecting that question. He was likely expecting a harsh dismissal, but like hell Steve’s giving in to that. 

“Last night. I remembered after I left the conference room. I was… the flashback I had…” he chokes on his own words and stumbles back a few steps. “I was back in the facility where they kept Yana, the day I broke her out. Except when it actually happened, the guy who tried to stop us, I caved his head in, and took Yana and ran. Natasha grabbed my arm, so I panicked and started cho-- It started going differently, than it did in the memory. Snapped me out of it then, but then later I started remembering… it was so close to what I did to Howard’s wife. And suddenly I remembered the whole thing. Don’t remember what I killed them over, but I remember everything else. Clear as day.”

“Good. So you haven’t been keeping it from us.”

“No. I was going to tell Stark and then pack up my shit and leave, the next time he came around. I doubt he wants his parents’ murderer sticking around his place,” Bucky says, with a humorless laugh. “Maybe, if everyone’s okay with it, he’ll let Yana stay, at least.”

“No,” Steve says firmly. “Bucky, Tony’s a reasonable guy. Up until the incident at the Triskelion, you were not yourself. You were not in control of your actions. Someone else was controlling you. We’ll explain it to Tony, and it might take him some time to process, but he’ll understand, I’m sure of it.”

Bucky scoffs, but doesn’t argue. Good. Steve didn’t want to have to fight anymore than necessary. 

“Look, I’ll text Tony now, and tell him we have to have an important conversation, face to face. He’ll get up here as soon as he can, and we’ll figure this out, okay?”

Bucky doesn’t respond. 

Steve takes out his phone, and sends a quick text to Tony, telling him,  _ Bucky just remembered something. We’ve gotta have a talk in person next time you come back to the compound. Not time sensitive, but important.  _

“Keep this between us until we talk to Tony, and then we’ll go from there, okay? Everything’ll be fine.”

Steve’s communicator goes off as soon as he’s done talking, and the fact that it’s his comm, not his phone, tells him that it’s important. He shoots Bucky an apologetic look and pulls out his comm, holding it up so Bucky can see the video feed of Natasha while she speaks to them. 

“Nat, what’s going on?” Steve asks, concerned by the look on her face.

“Cap, somebody just bombed the UN. The King of Wakanda is dead.”

“That’s terrible, but why is this an Avengers matter?” he asks, confused.

“Someone leaked some security footage of the perp to the press.” A video of CNN new coverage pops up next to Nat’s video feed, and Steve is shocked to find Bucky's face in the corner of the news screen, something about the Winter Soldier scrolling along the bottom of it. “I don’t know how this happened, but the King’s son is calling for Barnes’ blood.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know updates have been pretty frequent this week, but today's my birthday, so this weekend's probably gonna see a slowdown in updating. thank you all for reading!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter t'challa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bucky has a quick little flashback in this one.

The situation escalates from bad to really bad pretty quickly, because this sort of thing has Tony rushing back from New York City, which makes things difficult. He asks Steve if they can table their discussion until after this is handled, if it’s not time-sensitive, and Steve agrees. He doesn’t want to distract Tony from doing their job with the bombshell he’s got to drop. But he also doesn’t feel good about keeping this from his friend, about hiding the truth from him for even longer. 

But it’s remained hidden for years. A few more days won’t hurt anyone. 

What has hurt people though, is someone bombing the UN to try to force Bucky into the spotlight for some reason. 

What might hurt people is the chaos this is bound to cause. 

T’Challa, the prince of Wakanda, is justifiably infuriated and seeking to bring his father’s killer to justice. The only problem is he’s going to be looking for the wrong person. 

Steve’s about to ask what they can do to get a handle on the situation when Natasha says she’s already gotten on top of contacting every major news outlet to stop the coverage in relation to Bucky. 

They’ve got the people who know about Bucky’s trial, mostly a CIA agent, Everett Ross, keeping everything as tightly under wraps as they possibly can. Knowledge of Bucky’s location and of Yana will not get out, but the false information about the bombing is a little harder to control. 

They’re working on it. That settles everyone a little bit. 

And then Tony says, “I’ve invited T’Challa to meet with us. He’s on his way to the compound.” 

And Steve swears his heart flat out stops beating. 

It’s Clint that speaks first though. “You fucking what, Stark?” Then he glances over at Yana and says. “Shit, sorry, language.”

Bucky’s arm whirs and Steve tenses. Yana looks up and goes to sit in Steve’s lap so she can see over the table. Steve doesn’t miss the disappointed side glance that that earns them. But his attention’s on Tony, now, and the intense standoff that he’s gotten into with Clint and Nat, the argument that’s been stretching on for far too long. 

“Stark, you’ve lost your damn mind. You really think inviting T’Challa here, where Barnes lives, when he thinks Barnes killed his father, is a good idea? Did you hit your head? You start drinking at eight in the morning or something?” Clint bites out, throwing his hands up in the air. 

Natasha’s just glaring at him, like she’s deciding the quickest and cleanest way to kill him before T’Challa gets here. 

“Look, this is a less than ideal situation, but with that picture of Barnes’ face still out there in any capacity, there’s no way T’Challa’s going to rest in his hunt for him, until Barnes is dead, or we prove him innocent. He hasn’t left the compound in two and a half weeks. We can show His Royal Highness the damn security tapes if he needs it. But it’s better to nip this in the bud before it blows out of proportion and turns into an international incident. I’m getting ahead of things,” Tony justifies, gesturing wildly with his hands. 

The argument continues when Clint snaps back, and then turns off his hearing aids and shouts at Tony that he can’t hear him, and forces Natasha to get involved, and then Rhodey’s backing up Tony’s decision and Bucky’s just withdrawing in on himself even more and Steve’s got an arm protectively holding Yana against his chest and Wanda looks profoundly uncomfortable.

“The Wakandan Royal ship is approaching our airspace, sir,” FRIDAY says, some indeterminate amount of time later, interrupting the loud discussion. 

Clint switches his hearing aids back on at the sudden pause. “What? What happened?”

“They’re here,” Nat says softly.

Clint’s eyes go a little wide. 

Steve takes command of the room then, in the momentary silence. 

“Alright. There’s no avoiding this now. Wanda, Vis, Rhodey, Sam, Nat, take over the op center and get working on how this all happened. Find out who did this and why. Clint, join them if you want to, I don’t care, just take Yana with you, whatever you do. Tony, Bucky and I will greet Prince T’Challa and do everything we can to handle this entire situation peacefully. This is going to be fine. Now go.” The team breaks, and Clint carefully takes Yana from where she’s almost fallen asleep against Steve’s chest. “Buck, stay here, Tony and I will be back soon.” 

And then Steve leads the way out to the landing pad on the roof. 

They’re greeted with a bald woman glaring at them as she leads the way for the Wakandan prince. Steve is just the right amount of afraid of her. Mixed with a healthy dose of respect. 

“Your Highness,” Steve greets, with a nod of his head. “We were very sorry to hear about what happened.”

“Captain Rogers. Mr. Stark. Not that I don’t appreciate the invitation, but why have I been invited to the Avengers’ base of operations, now, of all times?” T’Challa says, as the woman, his bodyguard probably, steps to the side. 

Tony steps up to Steve’s side and extends his hand. T’Challa shakes it shortly. “It relates to what happened to your father. Come inside, we can discuss it further.”

T’Challa nods, and they go back into the conference room. 

Predictably, seeing Bucky sitting on the other side of the room, hunched in on himself, attention snapping to the door at the sound of their entrance, makes T’Challa very angry. 

“What is he doing here?” T’Challa demands, and his bodyguard takes up a defensive stance. 

T’Challa looks to be about two seconds away from launching himself across the room. Bucky, for his part, stands and takes a few steps in the other direction, putting as much distance between himself and the others as he can. He holds up his hands in what’s probably supposed to be a placating gesture, but with Bucky’s metal arm, it’s hard to seem non-threatening.

“Your Highness, we can explain,” Steve says quickly.

“This man is a murderer,” T’Challa snaps back, voice laden with heavy emotion. The man just lost his father, Steve expects nothing less. “That arm of his is a weapon. That makes him little better. Yet you’d still harbor him here, knowing all that he’s done?”

T’Challa is speaking to Steve and Tony, so he doesn’t see it, but the second the words ‘that makes him little better’ leave T’Challa’s mouth, Bucky’s hands go to the sides of his head and he sinks to his knees with a pained expression. Steve shoves past T’Challa without thinking and drops at Bucky’s side.

“Hey, hey, Buck, what’s wrong? Talk to me,” Steve mutters, taking Bucky’s wrists to pull his hands away from his head. 

In the background, Steve distantly hears T’Challa ask, “What is happening?”

And Tony’s snippy reply, “Flashback, probably. Seven decades of violent torture will do that to a guy.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky mumbles, and Steve takes a breath and releases him. Steve stands, thinking Bucky will rise with him. He does not. Bucky stays kneeling on the ground, unmoving. 

“Captain, what is going on?” T’Challa demands. His bodyguard has not risen from her defensive position. 

Steve shakes his head helplessly for a minute. “I don’t know,” he admits softly. “Buck, talk to me, please,” he says then, crouching again. 

At the movement, Bucky’s eyes go suddenly wide and he leaps to his feet, taking his own defensive stance. He looks terrified, and Steve’s hand subconsciously rises to his throat. 

Please, god, not this again, not in front of T’Challa.

“Steve?” Bucky asks after a pregnant silence. His defensive stance gives way to hunched shoulders and terrified eyes and Steve thinks he knows where Bucky is. Whatever spiral he’d lost himself on, Steve’s certain he’s back in Zola’s lab, the first time, the time Steve came to rescue him. “Steve, what’s going on? Where am I? When’d you… no is this… tell me it’s real, this can’t be fake again. Not again. Please.”

Steve’s heart breaks. “Buck, it’s fine. You’re okay. You’re not there anymore. You’re with me and Tony in the Avengers compound, remember?” 

Realization dawns in Bucky’s eyes a split second later, and he’s muttering an apology again, this time directed towards T’Challa. He tacks on a “Your Highness” at the end, like he wants to be sure. 

T’Challa, for his part, just looks confused. 

Bucky takes a breath, and when no one breaks the silence after a few seconds, he does. “I didn’t kill your father. I know the news is saying I did, and they’ve got that footage of me, but it’s not… that’s not me. I don’t do that anymore. I didn’t fight so hard to get free just to go back to what the forced me to do.”

T’Challa doesn’t look like he believes him. “You expect me to believe the word of a man who’s spent years killing?”

“None of that was by choice,” Bucky snaps back. 

“And why should I believe you?” T’Challa says, crossing half the room in just a few steps. 

“You don’t have to believe me, it’s the truth. I didn’t kill your father. I haven’t left this place in two weeks. I’m not that guy anymore. I’m not--” 

“Dad?” Shit, Steve thinks. Yana’s supposed to be with Clint! Where’d she come from? “Dad what’s goin’ on? Who’re you?” Yana asks, though she doesn’t seem really concerned with anyone answering her. She enters the room quietly, crossing to her father with concern written in the lines of her little face. She puts her hands on Bucky’s cheeks and moves his head around a little, then glances down at the way Bucky’s holding his arm.

“Did it happen again?” she whispers. 

Bucky just nods once and scoops her up and stands in one smooth movement. 

“You have a daughter?” T’Challa says, something like disbelief in his tone. 

“HYDRA wanted more of me. So they took what they needed and made more,” Bucky says quietly, voice strained. Yana’s clutching her arms around his neck like her life depends on it, and he tucks his face into the crook of her neck for just a second, like he wants to hide for a moment before continuing. “I have been in this compound for the last two weeks, working on building a case to clear my name and taking care of my kid. I’m sorry about what happened to your father, Prince T’Challa, but I didn’t kill him.”

“We can show you security footage if you don’t believe us,” Tony says from his place by the door. “Barnes’ presence in the compound has been kept under wraps, very few people know he’s facing trial for the Winter Soldier’s crimes, and even fewer know he’s here, while that’s happening.”

Steve, his voice still hoarse and strained, picks up from there. “We’d ask that you keep it quiet as well. It’s for his safety, and for Yana’s.” T’Challa nods and so does his bodyguard, and when neither of them speak, Steve continues. “We’d also like to extend an offer to help you find the person who is really responsible for killing your father, and help you bring him to justice. We’ve got a few questions for him as well.”

T’Challa turns to his bodyguard and they exchange a few quick sentences in a language Steve’s never heard before, and then T’Challa nods. 

“My apologies for the misunderstanding, Captain,” T’Challa says, visibly relaxing. Bucky sags in something like relief, too, hugging Yana closer to his chest, and Steve lets out a breath that could almost be a laugh. 

“You’re welcome to stay at the compound until we work this out,” Tony offers. “It’s not royal accommodations, but I think it’s pretty decent.”

Another few sentences in the other language, and T’Challa nods again. “Okoye will take word back to the rest of our people that I will be staying temporarily.”

T’Challa’s bodyguard, Okoye, nods once and then turns to Tony. “If I return to find any harm has come to him, I will use your own technology to end you,” she threatens, and then she smiles. “Would you care to show me out, Mr. Stark?”

Tony leads the way back to the landing pad. 

Steve likes that woman. 

Clint chooses that moment to come crashing into the room, out of breath. He starts signing rapidly, when he can’t get a deep enough breath, then, speaks after a moment. 

“She slipped away from me,” he pants. When he notices T’Challa, he greets him with a, “Hey, what’s up? I’m Clint,” and then continues on to Bucky and Steve, “I turned to answer a question for Nat for two seconds and she just bolted. Speedy little kid.”

“Clint, it’s fine,” Bucky says softly, running a hand over Yana’s hair affectionately before settling her back on her own feet. He mutters something in Russian, and Yana ducks her head, so Steve assumes he scolded her for running. 

“Prince T’Challa,” Steve says then, interrupting wherever that conversation may have been headed. “Why don’t we show you to our operations center? The rest of the team have already gotten started looking into who is really responsible for bombing the UN.”

With a last look at Bucky and Yana that Steve can’t decipher, T’Challa agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i said updates would slow down. i lied. hah. oh well. birthdays suck and i had time, so here we go!


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> late night conversations with the prince of wakanda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mentions of nightmares and bucky's past, also of the first encounter bucky had with yana

The next two days are entirely unproductive. They can’t find any leads on the real perpetrator anywhere, and half the authorities in the world are still on alert for the Winter Soldier, so they’re on their own. 

They keep coming up empty. 

T’Challa’s still a little wary around Bucky, and Bucky’s still avoiding T’Challa like he’s the goddamn plague, and in general the atmosphere is just very tense all around. 

Steve should’ve expected Bucky’s nightmares to get worse, really, but he’d been doing so well lately, his sleep not peaceful but at least quieter than usual, less tormented.

All good things come to an end, Steve supposes. 

It’s three in the morning when Steve hears a shout through the walls and jerks awake, gasping and looking wildly around his room for whatever could’ve caused it before he realises that it’s Bucky. He’s almost grateful for the sudden wake up, he’d been having his own nightmare, though it hadn’t been bad enough to startle him into waking. Still, he’s a little worried, so, as he has every time Bucky’s nightmares have woken him before, he tugs on a shirt and pads out into the hallway. 

He finds Yana stepping out into the hallway carefully, shoving Lucky out of the way so he can’t get into the room. As the door is sliding shut behind Yana, Bucky screams, and Yana covers her ears and sniffles. 

Steve is quick to sweep her into a hug, dropping to his knees and pulling her close to his chest in one graceful movement. She tries valiantly to stifle the noise, but Steve can still feel her crying against his shoulder as he leans against the wall outside Bucky’s room. 

“It’s okay kiddo. I know it’s scary, but he’s gonna be okay, I promise you,” Steve whispers, his lips pressed against her hair as he speaks. Her little hands clutch at Steve’s shirt like her life depends on it, and Steve’s heart breaks a little bit. 

Lucky noses at Yana’s arm, and when she doesn’t respond, the dog flops down onto the ground, resting his chin on Steve’s knee. Steve keeps one hand smoothly gently over Yana’s back, trying to settle her down, but he drops his other hand to the dog’s neck, and scratches behind Lucky’s ears. Lucky licks Steve’s wrist, and noses at his side when Steve loses his concentration and starts to slip into a dark corner of his mind. 

Steve thinks, sitting there with the dog keeping him from spiralling, that Lucky is a very fitting name for the little lab mix. They certainly are lucky that Clint found him and brought him back to the compound.

Yana settles after some indeterminate amount of time, though she remains sitting in Steve’s lap, her face tucked into the crook of his neck as though he can shield her from the reality of what her father is suffering through. 

Steve would sell his soul to be able to do that for her. 

Lucky whines pathetically and sits up to lick Steve’s face a couple times. Yana starts dozing off, Lucky curls up at Steve’s side, and Steve’s eyes slide shut, one arm still wrapped protectively around Yana, the other still resting in Lucky’s fur to keep himself a little more grounded. 

Steve’s almost slipped into sleep when a movement just to his left catches his attention, jolting him back into alertness. He’s up like a shot, clutching Yana close to him with one arm and half reaching for his shield that’s not there with the other and bracing to run. Yana makes a quiet noise of complaint, and Steve shushes her softly, his tired mind not really processing who or what he’s reacting to yet. 

And then he glances down at Lucky, who is sitting at his feet, blinking up at him slowly. Lucky seems entirely unbothered by the perceived threat. He noses at Steve’s leg and whines. 

Steve finally looks up again, slowing his rapid breathing as he does, to find T’Challa watching him curiously. 

Steve almost chokes as he exhales, he’s so relieved that he was just overreacting. 

“Your Highness. I’m sorry. I must’ve… I didn’t recognize you for a second,” Steve whispers with a self-deprecating smile and a very forced laugh. 

“Please, Captain, call me T’Challa. I would like to think we are becoming friends,” T’Challa says, a little too loudly, and Steve, without thinking, shushes the prince of a foreign country because he’s worried about Yana. He winces as soon as he does it. T’Challa almost laughs. 

“Sorry,” Steve mutters. “And uh, you can call me Steve, too. No one calls me Captain unless we’re doing business or battle.”

“Do not worry about it, Steve,” T’Challa says, quieter now. Steve nods his thanks. There’s a moment of silence, where T’Challa studies Steve carefully and then asks, “Are you alright?”

Steve realizes he’s still poised to run, still holding Yana tightly and raising his hand to reach for a weapon he doesn’t have on him. Steve forces himself to relax, and smile. 

“I’m fine, just a little tired.”

T’Challa cocks his head to the side a bit. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing in the hallway at such an hour?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Steve counters defensively. 

“I suppose I am still not entirely used to the time difference. I was simply taking a walk to try to calm my mind, so I might get some more sleep tonight,” T’Challa answers calmly. He’s nods, as though prompting Steve to answer as well. 

At that exact moment, Bucky screams again, and Steve tenses, putting his other arm around Yana, and hoping she doesn’t stir. Understanding dawns on T’Challa’s face.

“It’s nightmares. They wake Yana up, when they get bad, since she shares Buck’s quarters with him. When that happens, I sit with her till she falls back asleep. She doesn’t like being far from him, so we stay outside the door,” Steve explains in a voice barely loud enough to be heard. He knows, instinctively, that this is one of those conversations that will not leave these early hours of the morning.

T’Challa considers this for a moment. “The floor does not seem too comfortable, as nice as it is.”

“I’ve slept in far worse places,” Steve says. 

“She is asleep now. Walk with me, Steve? Natasha showed me a very nice tea that you keep stocked in the kitchen. Perhaps I can make you a cup?”

Steve glances at Bucky’s door once, and when he hears Bucky cry out again, he nods. He can take Yana with him. He can’t sit here and listen to Bucky suffer any longer. 

He follows T’Challa to the kitchen. Lucky trots along at his side. Yana shifts a little as Steve sits at the kitchen island, but she doesn’t really wake. Lucky flops down at Steve’s feet. He directs T’Challa towards the kettle and the mugs, though T’Challa is able to dig up the tea itself on his own. They’re silent as the kettle comes to a boil, as T’Challa prepares the tea, as they move from the kitchen to the common area. Steve settles Yana on the couch next to him, her head resting comfortably in his lap. She barely moves the entire time. Steve finds himself carding his finger through the girl’s hair as he accepts the mug from T’Challa. Lucky lays on top of Steve’s feet.

“I misjudged you all, when I first arrived here,” T’Challa says to break the silence. “I was so blinded by my grief that I didn’t stop to think that there could be more to the story.”

“We don’t hold it against you, T’Challa. I know how hard it is to lose a parent. Both of mine died long before I went on ice. It’s painful, but you still listened, when we told you Bucky was innocent. That’s all we could have asked for,” Steve insists. 

T’Challa nods and takes a slow sip of his tea. “I still regret what I said to Sergeant Barnes when I first met him. I have not found a moment to apologize to him though.” He glances back towards the hallway they came from, with a guilty expression, almost like T’Challa feels he might be responsible for Bucky’s nightmares tonight.

Steve considers for a moment, and then slowly responds, “It’s okay. He’s not… this isn’t because of what you said. The memories, of before, they come to him mostly at night, dreams, nightmares. He’s got seventy years of memories to catch up on, most of them pretty rough. It’s just how it is. I’d do something to help if I could but there’s nothing.”

“I’m sorry, Steve. I cannot imagine having to watch someone you love suffer like that.”

Steve freezes, because he doesn’t… that’s not… how did T’Challa know that he…?

He takes a deep breath to steady himself and drinks from his mug to cover for his sudden lack of ability to speak. 

T’Challa saves him from having to respond by continuing. “It’s very kind of you to take care of his daughter, as you do. I’m sure he appreciates it.”

Steve thinks for a moment and lets out a humorless laugh. “You know, I don’t think he actually knows. Clint takes care of her during the day, most of the time, if Buck’s not around, and she always gets up and goes back into the room before he wakes up, so I leave too. I mean it doesn’t matter, I’m not doing it for anything, I just never thought about that before.”

“Then it is all the more noble of you.”

Steve shrugs. “She’s a sweet kid. She deserves better than what she’s been given. They both do. I’m just trying to help however I can.”

“I assume her other parent is not involved with her at all?” T’Challa asks.

“Don’t know who they are or if they’re still alive, but if they are, like fuck they’re getting their filthy hands on her,” Bucky says. Steve hadn’t even noticed him entering the room. Bucky’s flesh hand is shaking when Steve glances over at him, but he shoves it in the pocket of his sweatpants to hide it, and Steve doesn’t say anything. “Why are you talking about me, and why’d you steal my kid?”

“You were having a nightmare, I heard, came to keep Yana company. T’Challa found us in the hall and we decided to come out here. Couch is more comfortable than the floor,” Steve says nonchalantly. 

Bucky studies them both for a moment before shuffling over to the couch tiredly and passing a hand over Yana’s forehead, the metal glinting in the low light coming in through the windows. 

“I didn’t mean to wake anyone. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t mind getting to spend a little more time with Yana. Tonight sounded worse than usual though. She was a little upset when I got to her.”

Bucky snaps his head up to look at Steve. “Than usual? This has happened before?”

“A few times. It’s not a big deal. I’m a light sleeper,” Steve says with a shrug. 

Bucky glances between him and T’Challa, and after a long moment, whispers, “I’m sorry,” again. 

“Do not apologize for what you cannot control, Sergeant Barnes,” T’Challa says. He takes a sip from his mug, as though this entire situation is nothing out of the ordinary for him. He has an incredible ability to keep calm, Steve thinks. “From what little I know of what you have lived through, I think you are fighting valiantly. Few people would be able to survive what you did and still have the will to care for themselves and a child.”

“She’s everything to me,” Bucky whispers. He hesitates, but finally takes a seat by Yana’s feet. Lucky’s tail reaches just far enough to brush against Bucky’s feet as he wags it. “I never expected… I mean after everything…”

“You’re a great father, Bucky,” Steve is quick to assure him. 

And maybe it’s the hour, or maybe he’s still feeling vulnerable from the nightmare, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but Bucky shakes his head and says, “No. Not that. I was going to kill her. When I remembered that she’s been created, I had no idea how old she’d be, how long she would’ve spent with HYDRA, if she’d have programming in her head like me. I thought it’d just be best for me to end it, so she wouldn’t suffer. I was ready to pull a gun on her and I then I saw her and fucking hell, Stevie she reminded me so much of you, with those blue eyes and the way I just wanted to protect her, I couldn’t do it. I was gonna get her out and drop her on your doorstep or something but then I spent a while lying low with her and I couldn’t do that either.” Bucky laughs derisively at himself. “And now, I want to raise her right and I can’t even let her get a good night’s sleep.”

There’s a pregnant pause, where Bucky just stares at Yana and Steve and T’Challa have no idea how to respond. 

Steve finally breaks the silence. “Buck, you’re a great father. You’ve just got some of your own stuff going on and need some help. There’s no shame in that.”

Bucky looks up at Steve then, like he hardly knows what they’re talking about. “What? I--Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s late. I should take her back to bed.”

The moment’s been broken, but still, T’Challa leans forward. “Sergeant Barnes, if this programming you mentioned is still causing you trouble, then perhaps I know of a way to help you. Think about it,” he offers and Bucky nods once, gathering his daughter into his arms. 

“Thanks, Your Highness. I’ll keep it in mind.” He turns to leave then, and falters. “And Steve? We’ve gotta tell Stark tomorrow. I remembered what I took from his parents.” 

And then Bucky’s gone. Steve doesn’t sleep the rest of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave comments or come talk to me about this fic on tumblr! i live for external validation! thanks for reading!


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tony learns what happened to his parents and a bomber is caught

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hooray for adult conversations and working things out like rational human people

T’Challa is understandably confused about Bucky’s comment about Tony’s parents, but Steve can’t just tell him what Bucky was talking about, this isn’t his place to go revealing things like that. So Steve sends T’Challa on his way with a sincere apology, and paces around the entire compound until seven in the morning when others actually start emerging from the personal wing of the compound and moving towards the common area. 

When Bucky finally joins the rest of them in the kitchen, his hair tugged into a messy bun, clothes disheveled, as though he had just thrown them on, he wastes no time in getting down to business. “Stark, we need to talk.”

“Sure thing, Robocop. This what Cap was telling me about a few days ago?” Bucky nods shortly, and passes Yana off to Clint. 

“You might not want an audience,” Steve says softly, before Bucky can continue. 

“Okay?” Tony sounds skeptical, but he still nods, and leads the way out. They wind up in the conference room, because apparently all bad things are going to happen in the conference room from now on. Tony sits. Steve and Bucky do not. Bucky’s arm whirs and clicks and then seemingly locks in place. “What’s going on, Barnes?”

“I remembered something, the day of the bombing. Wanted to tell you, but you asked to put it off. But I can’t now. You deserve to know and it might pertain to all of this,” Bucky says. His voice sounds strained. 

Steve clenches his jaw and starts when it sends a jolt of pain through his face. 

“I deserve to know what? What’d you remember?” Tony demands. 

Bucky goes rigid, clasping his hands together behind his back. He says, “Mission: December 16, 1991,” and Tony whispers, “No,” and Steve’s hands curl into fists. 

“I didn’t know, not until a few days ago, but I remembered after I… After what I did to…” Bucky’s eyes flick to Steve’s neck like he can still see the already-healed ring of bruises. “Item retrieval, no witnesses,” Bucky says quietly, robotically. “They wanted whatever your parents were transporting. I didn’t know at first, but last night, I remembered what I took from them. It was a case of experimental serum, like whatever they pumped me and Steve full of. Your father had it, Tony, and they made me… I’m sorry. That’s not enough, I know it’s not enough, but I’m sorry,” Bucky says, his voice scratchy and rough. 

Tony stands and walks over to Bucky. His hands are shaking. “You killed my parents,” he says. It’s not a question.

Bucky nods. 

Tony punches him in the face. 

Bucky rolls with the hit, stumbling a couple of steps to the side. He makes no move to fight back. 

“I think whoever bombed the UN might be trying to draw me out to find the location of the other soldiers HYDRA created with that serum. I can tell you where it is, so you can get ahead of him,” Bucky says, eyes fixed on the floor. Everything about his stance screams submission. Averted eyes, hunched shoulders, trying to make himself appear smaller. “I’ll have my stuff packed and be out of your hair by tonight. Just, please, let Yana stay. She doesn’t deserve to be stuck with me, she’s been doing so much better here than she was on the run. You’ll never have to see me again, but please let her stay.” He sounds on the verge of begging and Steve’s heart seizes in his chest. 

“Tony,” Steve says. 

“How long have you known about this?” Tony snaps. 

Steve stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Just a couple days ago. The day after the lawyers were here. We were going to tell you, but then the bombing happened and we all got caught up with that. We weren’t trying to keep it from you. We just didn’t want to dump it on you and catch you unaware.”

“He killed my mom, Steve!” Tony shouts, as though Bucky isn’t right there. Bucky flinches violently away from Tony, though his face stays set, carefully blank. 

“That wasn’t him. Tony, I can’t imagine how hard this is, but that wasn’t him. He had no choice, someone made him do it. Would you blame Clint for the deaths of any of the people on the helicarrier?” 

“No, but--”

“No, you wouldn’t because Loki did that to him. Loki forced him to do that. I know this is different because it’s your parents, and you every right to be upset and angry, but please, please remember that it wasn’t Bucky that decided to hurt them. To hurt you. HYDRA did that to you. Not Bucky. He’s a victim too,” Steve says. He’s pleading with Tony, begging. He’s not ashamed to admit it. 

“I’m not saying leaving the compound,” Tony says in a low, deadly calm voice. “But get the fuck out of my sight, Barnes. I don’t want to look at you.”

Bucky mutters a quiet, “I’m so sorry, Tony,” and he flees the room. 

Steve lets the silence sit for a moment, before he reaches out and places a hand on Tony’s shoulder. Tony doesn’t react to him at all. “Tony,” Steve starts. 

“Don’t. I get it. Wasn’t him. I know that. Christ I’ve seen how badly fucked the guy’s brain is, Rogers. But he killed my mom, Steve. Let me be angry. I’ll get over it eventually. I’m not kicking Barnes to the curb when I said I’d help him.”

“I was just going to ask if you needed anything. This is… I can’t imagine. I’m not upset that you’re angry with him. You’re allowed to be, as long as you keep in mind everything else that was at play. Process this however you need to. You deserve at least that much,” Steve says, with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. 

Tony scoffs. “What, you’re not gonna try defending Barnes’ honor to me?”

Steve shakes his head. “Bucky means more to me than I know how to explain, but you’re my friend too, Tony. You’re being reasonable about this, despite how much you’re hurting, that’s all I can ask for. So thank you for that. And if I can do anything, let me know.”

Tony looks at Steve then, and Steve can see that his eyes are shining with unshed tears, and for the first time in a while, Steve remembers that Tony Stark is not as unshakable as he seems. Tony takes a shuddering breath, and Steve drags him into a brief hug. 

Steve thinks that this bombshell is making Tony begin mourning his parents all over again, and doesn’t Steve know that feeling like the back of his hand. 

“It’s up to you what we tell the rest of the team,” Steve says quietly, as he pulls away. Tony scrubs a hand over his face and sighs. 

“The truth. We tell them the truth, that HYDRA killed my parents and Barnes remembered why, and then we get the location from Barnes and then you and I track down these other soldiers and stop this bastard. With any luck, we’ll beat him to the site and stop him before he gets his hands on those soldiers.”

And then Tony is out of the room. 

~*~

After a revelation from T’Challa, a very awkward trip to a long abandoned HYDRA facility and a short lived battle, a man named Helmut Zemo is in Interpol’s custody. 

Tony’s uncharacteristically silent as they clear out of the facility, leaving it to international authorities, and head back to the Avengers compound. Steve’s just as reserved, sitting by silently as Tony begins to steer them towards home. 

“I am sorry that you had to watch that video footage, Tony,” T’Challa finally says, when they’re about an hour into their trip. “No one should be made to witness such a thing.”

Tony shrugs. “I’ll survive.”

“We all will. But that does not excuse that man’s actions.”

“We killed his family, Your Highness. Our carelessness, my carelessness with Ultron, with the situation in Sokovia, it killed so many innocent people,” Tony counters, as though this makes him somehow deserving of what he’s been through.

T’Challa regards Tony carefully. “As the Black Panther, it was my duty to protect my father. I failed in that duty. Would you say that that makes me deserving of having to watch my father die?”

“What? No, of course not,” Tony says, confused. “What’s that got to do with--”

“I do not know you well, Tony Stark, but I do know that you are a good man and you are being too harsh on yourself,” T’Challa says. “All battles have casualties, as unfortunate as that fact is. We must mourn our dead, but we cannot let their deaths prevent us from living, or we dishonor their memory.”

“I’m not a soldier.”

“No, you are not. It is what makes you so good at what you do, I would assume.”

Steve is inclined to agree with T’Challa. Steve’s used to the casualties of battle, it’s an inevitability to him, as much as he hates it. He goes into every fight knowing that even if they do their best, they may not be able to save everyone. Tony goes in thinking they have to save everyone. It’s what makes him a hero. But it’s also what’s dragging him down, keeping him awake at night upgrading armor and weapons and tech. 

Steve’s glad someone else is able to say it to him, because he wouldn’t know how. 

That conversation dies quickly after that, and they sit in silence for a long time, before T’Challa once again breaks it. 

“Zemo said something about command words and the Winter Soldier,” he says conversationally. Steve still clutches the book he’s holding tighter. The book, red cover emblazoned with a star, just like the one on Bucky’s arm, tattooed on Yana’s shoulder. “What was he referring to, Captain?”

“The words that they used to brainwash Bucky. To make him do all the things he did as the Winter Soldier. If Bucky had still been out there like he thought, he was going to wait until authorities caught up to him, and find his way in to get close to Bucky and use the words to turn him back into the soldier again, make him turn on us. Turn us all against each other. We’re lucky we found Bucky first, otherwise I think he would’ve succeeded.”

“Sergeant Barnes still has trigger words embedded in his mind?” T’Challa asks, leaning forward, brows knitted together in concern.

Steve nods grimly. “This book has the only physical record of those words. It’s why I asked you not to say anything to anyone about us taking it. I’m not certain some government wouldn’t try to take advantage of Bucky with it.”

T’Challa nods once. “I believe that after my initial misconceptions about you, and after you helped me find my father’s killer, I am in your debt.”

Steve’s confused by that sudden switch in gears but he still shakes his head and waves a hand dismissively. “T’Challa, you don’t owe us a thing. We were just doing our jobs.”

T’Challa draws himself upright, and straightens out his shoulders. His tone leaves little room for argument when he speaks. “Captain Rogers, I owe you a debt for what you’ve done for me, and I have an idea of how to pay it off. I believe I know someone who can help Sergeant Barnes with his problem.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter shuri

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's a little shorter than most of the others, but it's mostly set up for the next one, and also the third update i've posted today, so we're all gonna deal with that.

The someone who could help with Bucky’s problem, it turns out, is T’Challa’s sister. His little sister. 

Tony and Steve are there with T’Challa the next morning to greet the princess, Clint hanging just behind them with Yana half asleep against his shoulder, and Lucky at Steve’s feet. Steve and Tony are dressed nicely to greet the visiting royal, but Clint is wearing a plain black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, squinting against the sunlight pouring in through the windows. 

When Steve asks him why he’s there if he looks so tired, Clint shrugs. “Kid wanted to be here, and Barnes is still shut away. I can’t say no to this face, I guess. Here I am.”

It brings a smile to T’Challa’s face, at least, so Steve doesn’t comment on the part about Bucky still being shut away in his room. The princess is coming here entirely because of him, he is going to have to come out sooner or later, and Steve’s not too sure how that’s going to go. 

The Wakandan Royal Ship lands then, and Steve stands at attention as the princess exits the ship. Yana stirs and demands to be set on her feet as the princess approaches them, followed closely by Okoye, the guard they had met when they first met T’Challa. 

When Steve first lays eyes on Princess Shuri of Wakanda, the only thing that he can think of is,  _ god she’s young _ and  _ while she’s here I will do everything necessary to keep her safe _ , the same protective instinct he feels for Yana flaring in his chest, though he’s certain that T’Challa can care for his sister, if she can’t take care of herself. 

“Brother!” she greets, running up to T’Challa and throwing her arms around him. Steve is very abruptly reminded that she’s also just lost her father, and hasn’t seen her brother since that happened, and yet still, she is here, to help Steve’s friend. Steve doesn’t know how to show how grateful he is feeling. When Shuri releases her brother she looks over them all, her eyes settling on Clint. “Brother, you did not tell me that one of your new friends was Evil Kermit,” she says. 

Her tone is joking and Tony almost chokes on his laughter, so Steve assumes it must be funny, but he’s so lost. Clint looks up, confused, and Steve thinks he must not have heard Shuri clearly. 

“What’s so funny, Stark?” Clint demands, glaring. 

“Nothing,” Tony answers too quickly. 

“Who’s Kermit?” Yana asks, and Clint’s attention is drawn to her, as is Shuri’s. 

Shuri’s face lights up and she crouches in front of Yana, smiling. “Hello, little one! And who are you?” Lucky comes up to her when she crouches, and Shuri happily pets the dog as she speaks to Yana.

“I’m Yana,” she says. “Uncle Clint and Captain Steve says you’re a real life princess, is that true?”

Shuri nods and Yana grins brightly. “Yes I am. And my brother is the prince.”

“That’s boring though. Not as cool as being a princess,” Yana says and Tony barks out a laugh again. Steve can’t much keep his composure either. T’Challa chuckles too. 

“Shuri, this is Sergeant Barnes’ daughter,” T’Challa explains, and Shuri nods in understanding, righting herself to make introductions to the others. 

“You must be Captain Rogers and Mr. Stark. Very nice to meet you both. And you are?” she asks as she turns to Clint. 

Clint squints, and brushes the hood off his head with a sigh, glaring at Lucky. “Sorry, there must be something wrong with my aids. I didn’t get any of that.”

Understanding dawns on Shuri’s face and she is careful to face Clint head on when she speaks again. “It’s very nice to meet you,” she says, a hand extended. 

Clint shakes her hand and gives her a soft grin. “Clint Barton. Hawkeye.”

Shuri releases his hand with a nod. “The bow and arrows, yes. May I?” she asks, gesturing to his ears. Clint hesitates, but removes one of his hearing aids and passes it over. 

“The damn dog stole them from my nightstand yesterday, they’ve been on the fritz ever since,” Clint explains. “If you face me when you speak, I should be able to gather enough, if you really need something from me, don’t worry.”

Shuri shakes her head. “If you don’t mind, I know I am here to help Sergeant Barnes, but I could make some adjustments to these and improve them greatly.”

Clint shrugs. “If you want to, I won’t say no, but really don’t have to worry about it.”

Shuri waves a hand at him dismissively. “Nonsense. It will be fun. I have much of my equipment with me. We’ll see how much better I can make them.”

Tony looks affronted, but Shuri doesn’t seem to notice or if she does, she doesn’t care. Clint laughs. Lucky barks and noses at Shuri’s knee until she returns the aid to Clint and reaches down to pet the dog again. 

Steve cuts in then, before this gets out of hand. “Princess,” he starts and she cuts him off. 

“Please. You are all friends of my brother. Call me Shuri. There’s no need for formalities among friends,” she says, without taking her attention away from the dog. 

“Shuri, then,” Steve corrects. “Why don’t I help you unpack the equipment you’ve brought with you, and help you set up whatever you’ll need, and then we can introduce you to Bucky?” With a glance back at Okoye, Steve adds, “And we can show you to a guest room so you can rest, ma’am. You’ve just flown through the night, you must be exhausted.”

She looks like she’s going to protest but T’Challa nods in agreement. “Shuri and I will be fine, Okoye. You have gotten her here safely. Rest now, General.”

Steve looks to Tony and Tony nods, leading Okoye towards the guest wing of the compound. Steve, T’Challa and Clint take to helping Shuri unload the equipment she’s brought along, less than Steve was expecting she’d need, but still an impressive amount. Yana weaves in and out of their paths, intrigued by everything she can see. 

She reaches up to grab at something and the sleeve of her shirt shifts, just enough to bare the edges of her tattoo. Shuri catches sight of it, and so does T’Challa and they both freeze, and Steve remembers that they had no idea about that. Clint shoos Yana out of the ship and back inside, telling her to stop touching everything she sees, and Steve swoops in to explain. 

T’Challa looks concerned, but Shuri just sets her jaw and takes a deep breath.

“She is too young to have suffered so much. I will do whatever necessary to help your friend, Captain. It is the least we can do, to thank you for helping bring our father’s killer to justice,” she says softly.

Steve shakes his head. “It’s just Steve. No need for formalities among friends,” he echoes her own words back at her. “And you really don’t owe us for that, but I’m incredibly grateful that you’ve agreed to help Bucky. This means more to me than you could possibly know.”

Shuri just smiles, and reaches out to place her hand on Steve’s forearm, giving it a reassuring squeeze, before leaning forward a little bit and telling him to bring the final box inside.

Shuri reminds Steve a hell of a lot of Peggy Carter. It’s a good thing, he decides. 

~*~

Shuri’s only been there an hour and she’s already taken over Tony’s workshop and fixed Clint’s hearing aids. 

She’s also improved them so that their battery life is more than six times what it was, and so that they allow him to hear a slightly larger range of sound. Clint is over the moon. 

“I can tell you’re not fit for active duty at the moment,” Shuri says with a gesture at his still casted arm, “but if I have a bit more free time later, perhaps I can design you a set for when you are in combat, an in-ear model, you could say. You wouldn’t be able to wear them for long periods of time, but you wouldn’t have to worry about those ones falling off in battle.”

Clint grabs both of Shuri’s shoulders and looks at her very seriously. “If you didn’t already have a very nice family, I’d adopt you, I swear to god,” he declares solemnly. 

“I’d have to decline, but I’m glad you like them,” Shuri jokes, turning to pull out the last few things she brought with her. “Would you mind checking in with Steve to see how he’s doing with Sergeant Barnes?” she asks then, eager to be able to speak to the man in question so that she can begin figuring out the best route to go to help him. She owes it to the team that found her father’s killer, no matter what they say.

“He’s doing fine,” a voice says from the door, and Shuri looks up from where she’s unpacking the last of her equipment to find a man with a metal arm watching her. Her first thought is that she can improve that as well. Then she takes in the rest of him, the slump of his shoulders, the way he’s obviously trying to make himself seem less imposing, the bags very visible under his eyes. She decides in that moment that she’d want to help him, debt to the Avengers or no. “They tell me you’re gonna help me get my head on straight.”

“Unfortunately, I do not have a solution for everything that is troubling you, Sergeant Barnes. But this issue with command words implanted in your mind? I believe I can fix that for you. And after that, maybe we can improve that arm of yours a little bit. Have a seat. Let’s begin.”

He sits. 

Shuri begins.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shuri begins her work

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bucky has a seizure in the chapter, watch out.

 

They spend the whole first day Shuri’s in the compound just talking. She’s appalled to hear of the treatment that Sergeant Barnes suffered at the hands of HYDRA, but she needs to know what’s been done, to know what she has to undo. Halfway through the day, Sergeant Barnes’ daughter comes running into the room, clambering into her father’s lap with a wicked grin on her face. 

Not even a minute after she settles in, Clint comes careening around the corner into the lab, panting hard and bracing a hand on the door jamb. “Slippery little bugger,” he gasps, waving a hand in Yana’s general direction, and Shuri remembers that Clint was meant to be looking after the child while Sergeant Barnes was busy. 

Shuri smiles as Sergeant Barnes hands his daughter off to Clint, a fond expression tugging at the corners of his eyes and the curve of his lips. Shuri is glad. She thinks he deserves this happiness.

“Stop losing my daughter, Barton,” Sergeant Barnes says, his tone annoyed, though his face gives it away that he is joking.

“It’s not my fault she’s a mini super-person. You don’t pay me enough for this,” Clint complains. 

“I don’t pay you at all,” Sergeant Barnes points out. “I’ll take you out for coffee sometime if they decide not to throw me in prison,” he jokes. 

“Acceptable compromise. You hear that, you little demon? You’ve gotta stay put now. I’ve got coffee on the line,” Clint teases Yana as he leaves the room, digging his fingers into her sides just enough to make her squeal with laughter. Shuri can’t help but smile as they retreat from the lab. 

“You are lucky to have him,” she comments as they watch Clint and Yana leave. 

Sergeant Barnes nods. “Yeah, I am. Don’t know how I’d be functioning without all his help, honestly. The others help too, but Clint’s been doing a lot for me and Yana since we got here.”

Shuri is glad that he has someone to love, who loves him back, and who loves his daughter. She’s known the man for less than a day, but she can already tell that he has suffered more than enough for several lifetimes. 

She continues on with the line of questioning that had been interrupted. They have to take a break when Sergeant Barnes begins to describe the machine they used to wipe his memory in detail, and Shuri sits by and places a gentle hand on his flesh and blood shoulder while he trembles with the memory of it. She prods him gently forward when he seems a little more at ease, but does not force him to talk about anything anymore than he wants to, though the gaps in his explanations are frustrating to the scientist in her. Still, by the end of the day, when they’ve been through everything he can think of, she’s grateful for the extra information, to make sure that she is doing everything she can to keep him safe while she attempts to remove the programming in his head. This is the most difficult thing that Shuri has ever attempted. These are the highest stakes she’s ever faced, a man’s life all but in her hands. She is determined not to fail. 

At the end of the day, Sergeant Barnes stands to leave, and hesitates, his metal arm whirring and clicking as he finally thrusts something, a book, it looks like, in her general direction. 

“What is this?” she asks, taking it carefully from him. 

“The book,” he says, as though that clears her confusion. When she still shakes her head in confusion after that, he takes a deep breath and forges onward. “This is the only remaining record of the trigger words in my head. Anyone who used to know them is dead, or currently being prosecuted for bombing the UN. I don’t know if anything else in there will be of use, but I thought you might want to look over it. I’m trusting you with them. With--I’m trusting you with everything I am. Please don’t make me regret it, Princess,” he finishes softly, his flesh hand curling tightly around the wrist of his metal arm. 

She reaches out slowly and places her hand over his, squeezing it briefly, in what she hopes is a reassuring manner. 

“Thank you, for putting so much trust in me. I will not let you down, I promise. We’ll begin the process to remove the command words from your mind tomorrow. Rest well, Sergeant Barnes, we have a long day ahead of us.”

He shakes his head as she draws away from him. “No, it’s… it’s just Bucky. Or James. Or Barnes. Or anything. Just not him. I haven’t been Sergeant Barnes in a long time. You don’t have to call  me that.”

Shuri nods. “Of course, James. Good night.”

“Good night, kid,” James says, and he’s quick to leave the lab after that.

She finds herself smiling after him. She decides then that she really does like this man and his daughter that have suddenly become such a focus in her life. She is glad to be able to help them.

~*~

The next morning finds Shuri nursing a cup of truly horrible coffee that Clint had made for her, the book James had given her sitting closed in front of her on the lab bench. 

“I hear you’re cutting the puppets strings today,” a voice says from the doorway and Shuri turns to see Tony Stark, holding two mugs and wearing sunglasses inside for some reason. He plucks her mug from her hand and replaces it with one of the ones he came in with. “Clint’s well meaning, but he makes really bad coffee this early in the morning,” he says by way of explanation. 

Shuri nods her thanks and goes back to examining the small piece of tech resting on top of the closed book on the table in front of her. 

“Good morning to you too Mr. Stark. You’re welcome to stay and watch, if you’d like. There’s a small chance I may need an extra pair of hands at some point,” she offers. 

“Thanks for the offer Princess, but I’ve got a couple other things I’ve got to attend to today. I just came to see if there’s anything you might need, make sure the space is working for you. And to bring you better coffee. Cap really likes Barnes. If you’re going to be working on him, you should be properly caffeinated,” Tony says with a shrug, stepping just close enough to peer over Shuri’s shoulder without invading her space. 

Shuri shifts to the side to show him what she’s looking at. Before he can ask, she explains, “A pet project. Clint’s hearing aids like they could be improved for active combat situations, so I’m working on designing him an in-ear model that he can wear while working with the Avengers. I’ve pieced together a little bit of it while I was taking a break from going over Sergeant Barnes’ information. It was a lot to get through.”

“I’m sure it was.” There’s something off in Tony’s voice, but Shuri can’t quite pinpoint what it is. It’s not her biggest concern at the moment. 

“Good morning, Princess,” she hears from behind them, and Tony’s attention snaps to the door, much faster than Shuri’s does. James enters the lab far less confidently than Tony did, his shoulders hunched, glancing around as though he’s expecting to be kicked out at any moment. 

“Good morning, James,” she greets with a smile. 

Tony straightens his back, as though trying to make himself taller, and picks up the mug he’d taken from Shuri when he first came in. 

“Well, if you’re all set in here, I’ll be going. Just give FRIDAY a holler if you need anything. She’ll help you out. Best of luck Princess,” Tony says, and he’s gone before Shuri can even say goodbye. 

James does not explain what that was all about. 

They dive right in to what Shuri has planned, part one of a four part process she is confident will rid James of the trigger words implanted in his brain. 

Part one goes smoothly. 

Part two does not. Part way through Shuri’s work, James gets a faraway look in his eyes. Shuri calls his name, and he does not respond, and he suddenly slips from his seat, crashing to the floor. By the time Shuri rounds the lab bench, James is seizing on the floor. 

Her breath catches in her chest and some distant part of her mind supplies the word “seizure”, and Tony’s reminder that FRIDAY could help if she needed. 

“FRIDAY!” Shuri shouts at the ceiling. “Call Clint to the lab. Tell him it’s urgent, I think James is having a seizure. Please, I don’t know what to do!” For all her intelligence, this is one thing she just doesn’t know about, and it’s terrifying. 

“Agent Barton is on his way, Princess Shuri. I’d recommend turning Sergeant Barnes onto his side, and cushioning his head while you wait. I’ve begun timing the seizure already.”

Shuri does as the AI instructs. What feels like an eternity, and turns out to be two minutes later, Clint comes skidding into the lab, dropping to his knees next to James and Shuri. 

“How long are we at, FRIDAY?” Clint asks. 

“Three minutes and six seconds, Agent Barton,” FRIDAY responds, flashing the timer on all of the screens around them, so that Clint can have the visual as well. 

Clint nods and checks James over quickly, tugging the collar of his shirt down a bit, away from his neck, making sure his head is supported, checking his pulse, his breathing. Clint keeps up a steady stream of chatter the entire time he works, muttering nonsense and simple reassurances to James.

When the timer ticks over to four minutes and one second, James’ body finally begins to relax, and Clint along with him. 

“Alright. He’s coming out of it. You did good, kid. He’s going to be okay. It’ll take more than a seizure to keep a super-soldier down, but you did the right thing, calling me. You did good. He’s okay. He’s okay,” Clint says, looking up at Shuri finally, and, after a moment’s hesitation, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She realizes then that she’s shaking. “Hey, I know it’s scary, seeing something like that happen, but we’ll have Dr. Cho come up here, run some scans, and we’ll find out what caused it, and then you’ll be back to helping him get better in no time. You did good. This isn’t your fault, Shuri.”

Shuri nods and leans her head on Clint’s shoulder and just breathes for a moment. 

They don’t move until James stirs. 

~*~

Hours later, and Shuri has completed Clint’s in ear hearing aids, and Helen Cho has completed her scans. 

Helen tells her that there was a small implant, some long forgotten HYDRA thing hidden under Bucky’s long hair, that sent out an electrical impulse that caused the seizure, when Shuri’s work interfered with it.

Shuri tells Helen to ensure there are no others like it as quickly as possible.

She is determined, now more than ever, to give James his life back.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some progress is made

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY things are starting to look up

Bucky is awake while they remove the implant from beneath his skin. Anaesthetics don’t work on him. He thinks he blacks out for part of it. By the time he’s really aware of what’s going on, Steve is tense, Cho looks afraid, the lab table he was bracing himself on is half crushed, but the implant is removed. It’s the last remnant of HYDRA control in his body, save the arm. 

He feels… lighter. Then whatever busted circuit is malfunctioning in his arm zaps him again and he scowls, but hey. Baby steps. 

Shuri completes her work on his mind in a ridiculously fast time span. Bucky’s truly impressed with her intelligence and capabilities. He’d be more impressed if his sanity and agency were not hinging on her succeeding. As it is, for all he believes she is capable, he’s still terrified and skeptical of everything she’s done to him. 

Once she’s done, she steps in front of him with The Book, her hands shaking as she opens it to the pages that contain the command words.

“Are you sure about this, James? You wouldn’t rather have Clint or Captain Rogers be here with you?” she asks, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She’s nervous, he can tell. Good. He wouldn’t be trusting her to do this if she weren’t nervous. 

After only a moment’s hesitation, he says, “I trust you, kid.” And he does, even after only knowing her for such a short period of time. Shuri reminds Bucky of Yana, and even without the strangely strong protective feeling he has regarding her, he’s found that he enjoys her dry sense of humor and the way she’s gentle but doesn’t tiptoe around him like others seem to. He trusts her, for better or for worse at this point. “Besides, I think you’re the only one that’ll read the Russian correctly,” he jokes to try to lighten the mood. 

“I’m not questioning my own work, because my work is flawless, always,” she says, confidently, and then, far less confidently, “but what if I haven’t succeeded? I’ll be taking away your will with these words, James.”

Bucky takes a deep breath, and wills his flesh hand to stop shaking. “You won’t take advantage of it. I know you won’t. It’ll wear off, or someone will knock it out of me, and I’ll be back to myself eventually,” he says, tone light to hide the almost all consuming fear that he will revert back to the Soldier within the next few minutes. “You have to test it to make sure it worked. It’s okay.”

“Okay. Well, here goes nothing.” Shuri flips to the correct page in The Book, and, with a last nervous glance at Bucky, begins to read. “ _ Longing. Rusted. Seventeen.” _ Bucky’s metal arm seizes, and the edge of the lab bench crushes under his fist. _ “Daybreak. Furnace. Nine.”  _ He groans and has to focus his breathing, his mind going foggy, and his thoughts turning into a frantic stream of  _ god no no no no, I was supposed to be fixed she was supposed to fix me not this again. “Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight car.”  _ Shuri snaps The Book shut. “Sergeant Barnes?”

Bucky looks up to meet her eyes, and a blinding grin spreads over his face, because he can  _ think _ and he’s  _ himself _ even after hearing the words read, and she did it, she really did it, he’s  _ free _ . 

He stands abruptly and steps forward, sweeping her into his arms. 

Shuri yelps in surprise before realizing that he’s not trying to hurt her. He’s hugging her. 

“You did it,” he whispers, disbelieving. She finally gets with the program and returns the hug, a rare display of affection for someone who isn’t his daughter. “You did it, kid. You fixed me. Thank you,” he says, and there’s so much raw emotion in his voice that he can’t hide, he’s really glad that Shuri’s the only one here to witness it. “Oh my god, thank you.”

He finally draws away, though he still keeps his flesh hand on Shuri’s shoulder, looking at her like he can’t believe she exists. 

“It was nothing, James. Simply repaying the favor. You all helped my brother and I find our father’s killer. I was happy to help you in return.”

Bucky shakes his head and blinks. There are not tears in his eyes. There are not. “Shuri, you gave me my free will back. No one can turn me into a mindless animal again. They can’t take my will away, they can’t take advantage of me. You… you gave me myself back.”

Shuri’s face does something funny when he says that and she lunges forward, to hug him again. It’s brief, but Bucky’s not complaining. 

“You deserve nothing less.” There’s a moment where neither of them speak. Bucky’s arm sends a jolt of pain through his chest and he winces before he can think to hide it. “You know, since you trust me so much, I could look at your arm as well. I’ve noticed it seems to bother you. I could do some basic maintenance, and work on a replacement when I get back to Wakanda. It will give me an excuse to return to America, too. Your country is fascinating,” she says with a grin.

And Bucky feels like he wants nothing more than to sleep for a week or two after everything that’s happened in the past couple days, but god this thing hurts and even if he is technically functional still, he’s not  _ comfortable _ , and Shuri says it like it’d be no big deal. So he says yes. 

Which is how Steve wanders into the lab to find Bucky taking off his shirt in front of Shuri. Steve’s eyes go wide and he looks really concerned until Shuri steps closer and begins to prod at the place where Bucky’s arm connects to his shoulder, entirely unaware of Steve’s presence. 

“My gods, what did they do to you? This is horrible! Is this just fused to your torso? How could they have possibly done this without…” she trails off and says in a very soft voice. “The anaesthesia didn’t work on you, when Dr. Cho wanted to remove that implant. Were you awake while they attached this to you?” 

Bucky has too look away from Steve when he nods. “For a lot of it. I think. I don’t really remember. It’s one of the earlier memories, and those are all real hazy.” Shuri pokes something, and Bucky jumps when it sends a shock through his body. 

“First of all, you have a piece of what I think is a bullet lodged in between the plating of your arm back here,” Shuri says firmly, her voice carefully free of the emotion she was showing before. “And second, James, how long has it been causing you this much pain? All of the skin around it is inflamed, and your muscles keep… Just. How long?”

Bucky shrugs with just his right shoulder. “Since before I got here. I was functional. Didn’t need maintenance.” Steve looks crestfallen. Shuri smacks the back of his head. “Hey!” Bucky protests indignantly.

“You should have said something. Sit down, you impossible idiot,” she demands. Bucky sits. He really likes this kid. 

Steve pulls up a stool too, and when Shuri doesn’t say anything, or try to shoo him out of the lab the way Bucky imagines Stark would, Steve sits. 

Shuri wastes no time in pulling his arm apart, and it takes a lot of self control and reminding himself that Shuri is not a threat, she is a friend, she is helping, but he manages to stay still while she does it. By the look on Steve’s face and Shuri’s frequent checking in, his effort is showing. 

“James are you certain you’re alright?” Shuri asks for the third time, and Bucky nods, though his gritted teeth and furrowed brow say otherwise. “Can you tell me why you’re so nervous? Maybe it will help,” she offers, tugging at an exposed knot of wiring that he’s pretty sure is not supposed to look like that. 

“Reminds…” Bucky trails off before he can even get a full sentence out, concentrating very hard to get his thoughts together. “HYDRA. They used to… when my arm got damaged. They weren’t careful like you are. It’s uh. Can’t shake the memory, I guess.”

Shuri nods and situates herself within Bucky’s sightlines, which he’s grateful for, and begins asking Steve to hand her tools instead of moving around to get them herself. It does wonders for Bucky’s nerves, to have her consistently in his sight.

She also begins to talk. 

She tells him stories about her brother and her mother, carefully skirting around the topic of her father. She tells him about the woman she’s certain her brother is in love with, and about the Dora Milaje, and how she used to want to grow up to be a warrior until she found a passion for technology, for engineering and inventing. Steve interrupts and asks questions, every once in a while, about her home, about technology they didn’t have as kids, about ways the world has changed. 

He asks her about memes, and she talks about that for longer than she talks about anything else. 

Bucky gets lost in the sound of their voices and finds himself almost relaxing while Shuri works. 

“Hang on, this should…” she mumbles a while later, interrupting herself. “I’m going to look at the back of your shoulder,’ she warns, and Bucky can just feel the pressure of her fingertips near the junction of flesh and metal, where his nerves are destroyed and the metal limb isn’t quite as sensitive. 

She pulls at something, and digs a sharp something into the arm is just the wrong way that makes Bucky shout in surprise, and then grit his teeth against the pain, and she’s muttering an apology but not removing whatever she’s stuck him with and then suddenly it’s gone and  _ god _ Bucky feels like he can breathe again. 

“What did you do?”

“I’m sorry,” Shuri says, stepping around to face him again, metal shards in the palm of her hand. She looks triumphant. “But I fixed what was causing the issue with your arm! You had these pieces lodged in your shoulder, where you wouldn’t be able to see them. I took them out. That, plus what I tidied up in your circuitry should have you feeling much better until I can create a better prosthetic for you in my own lab. As nice as Stark’s space is, mine is better,” she says, leaning towards them conspiratorially. 

Steve smirks and Bucky almost laughs, and as Shuri puts his arm back together, he finds he’s not afraid of her pulling any sort of stunt with it. 

~*~

The next morning, they all say goodbye to T’Challa and Shuri. They still have their own responsibilities in Wakanda, T’Challa has a country to run and Shuri has her own projects to attend to at home, and they both want to be there with their mother. But they leave with the promise of one day inviting their new friends to see their home country, and Shuri leaves with the promise that she will be back soon to give Bucky his new arm. 

They all wish T’Challa the best of luck taking over as King of Wakanda, and Shuri luck with her endeavors, and they board their ship with Okoye, and they leave. 

Bucky finds that he’s actually looking forward to seeing them again.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tony and steve have a heart to heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tony references his time in captivity in this chapter, so look out.

About a month into Bucky staying at the compound, Steve jolts out of sleep in the middle of the night and, upon realizing that he won’t be getting anymore sleep that night, gets up. He takes a few minutes to settle himself down, goes to his bathroom to wipe the sweat from his face with a damp cloth, pulls on a shirt he’s pretty sure isn’t actually his. 

He pads out of his room in bare feet towards the kitchen, looking for a glass of water, and maybe something to eat to settle the churning in his stomach. God he wishes he could get drunk. 

He shakes that thought out of his head and makes his way into the kitchen, fully expecting to have the space to himself at this hour of the morning, only to find Tony holding a mug of something he suspects is coffee. Also much to his surprise, Yana is perched on the counter in front of where Tony is standing, her forehead resting against Tony’s chest while she sleepily tells him a story. 

“Hey Cap, couldn’t sleep either?” Tony says, as though this is a casual conversation that normal people have all the time. 

Steve almost wants to scoff at him, but then he notices the fine tremor running through Tony’s hands, and the way he’s got one hand resting protectively on Yana’s back, and Steve knows that Tony’s in the same fragile mindset that he’s in at the moment too. Steve doesn’t say anything. 

“Hi Captain Steve,” Yana mumbles into Tony’s shirt, and Tony’s hand flexes convulsively on Yana’s back and Steve’s chest tightens. 

They’re silent for a long minute, and Steve can hear Yana’s breathing even out. Tony makes no effort to move her. Steve gets a glass of water and settles into a seat on the other side of the kitchen island. He hunches in on himself subconsciously, trying not to take advantage of the full extent of his size.

“Are you okay Tony?” Steve asks after a while. 

Tony just shrugs. “Been stressed. I’ve spent all week arguing with politicians and government assholes about why it’s best for Barnes to stay with us and why they shouldn’t rush the trial. Stress makes the nightmares worse, I guess.”

And isn’t that like a slap to the face. Steve had no idea Tony had been working so hard on Bucky’s behalf. Tony hadn’t said anything, and after everything that had gone down the week before, Steve’s shocked.

“I had no idea,” Steve whispers.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Why are you doing this?” Steve asks, and only after he says it does he realize how petulant that sounded. It’s too late to take it back though. 

Tony doesn’t seem too off put by it though, just takes a deep shuddering breath and shakes his head. “Honestly? Not too sure. I don’t know how I feel about Barnes right now. I know it wasn’t his fault my parents are… but it was still him that did it. It’s tough to reconcile. But then I think about her and…” Tony trails off, looking down at the sleeping girl slumped against his chest. “I’ll be honest, if the kid wasn’t involved, I wouldn’t be working this hard. But as much as I know we’d all be happy to take care of her, I don’t want her to have to grow up only being able to see her dad through a plexiglass window.”

Steve cocks his head to the side. “You’re running yourself ragged for Buck just cause you feel bad for Yana?” 

Tony gets a distant look in his eyes, staring at something just over Steve’s left shoulder without seeing a single bit of it. 

Tony shrugs and they lapse into silence again. 

Steve breaks it again. 

“You know, I’ve been so caught up with Bucky and Yana, I haven’t actually taken the time to ask how you’ve been doing. Bucky’s something else to me, but I never meant to be like this to you, Tony.”

Tony shrugs. “You’ve got your priorities. I can’t get mad at you for that. Especially when one of them is this one,” he says, with a glance down at Yana. 

Steve puts his head in his hands, and develops a sudden, intense interest in the view of the countertop through his water glass. 

“You know, you always defer to me, when we’re in combat, or for debriefs. For a lot of things. You always say I’m the boss, like I’m some experienced soldier who knows his way around a battlefield and everything but I…” Steve takes a deep breath. “Tony, I’m only twenty-five. I was a kid when I went under. I was only twenty-one. I’m still… I’m hardly older than Wanda, but everyone looks at me and sees Captain America and assumes I know what to do, but I don’t. I’m trying to help Bucky and make sure Yana’s okay, and I’m still trying to help Wanda with going through losing Pietro and my own--well, that’s not important, anyway, but I just don’t know what to do. I’m trying to help everyone, but all I’m doing is failing them.” Steve snaps his mouth shut and stares down into his water glass, tracing his finger around the rim. Yana stirs and makes a noise and Tony holds her closer until she calms again. 

“Your own what?” Tony asks, and Steve curses his big fucking mouth for letting that one slip. 

“It’s nothing important,” he says dismissively. 

Tony cocks an eyebrow and taps the spot where the arc reactor used to sit in his chest. “You know I still have nightmares about getting that thing? The reactor wasn’t just--at first it was a crude, patch job magnet shoved into my chest and connected to a car battery. I had a man’s hand in my chest while I was awake, Steve. I remember it. I was half dead while it was happening, sure, but I remember enough. I nearly died in New York too. Before I destroyed them, I used to have to sleep with two suits on guard at all times cause I couldn’t shut my fucking brain up.

“Steve, you just said it yourself. Jesus, you’re twenty years younger than I am. You’re young. You don’t have to shoulder this all on your own. Especially with everything going on now, watching Barnes suffer like he is, and trying to figure out how the kid fits in to everything. We all have our own shit. That’s half of why we have each other, so we’re not alone in it. So what did you mean? Your own what?”

Steve has to physically fight the urge to shrink under Tony’s glare. 

“Uh. Clint says it might be PTSD. It’s nightmares, mostly. He said I should talk to Nadia about it, but there’s been more important things going on.” Steve shrugs, and feels his shoulders hunch even more. It’s times like this he almost regrets the serum. He hates taking up so much space, being so conspicuous. He commands a room with his presence, and sometimes, he wishes that he could be small and unnoticeable again. That he could live for just a few minutes without anyone depending on him. He just wants to go back to being Steve Rogers again. Just Steve Rogers. 

Almost. 

The part of him that likes helping people always wins out, the part that tells him that he has the ability to stand up for the little guy and that if he does nothing with that, then he’s not all that good of a guy. He still thinks about it sometimes though, what it would be like to not be Captain America anymore. 

“More important things than your mental health?” Tony interrupts his thought spiral.

Steve shrugs halfheartedly. “I mean with Bucky and Yana and then T’Challa’s father and Bucky remembering what he did… I’ve dealt with it on my own for the four years since they defrosted me. I haven’t wanted to bother anyone. I talk to Sam sometimes now, that’s enough.”

“Steve, you’re an idiot.”

Steve scrunches up his face in something that could almost be irritation. “Thanks.”

“I mean it. Everyone on this team would move hell and earth for you. I mean, Pepper regularly inquires about you specifically. Wanda and Vision seek you out before anyone else for advice. You’re the only person besides Clint that I think Nat has ever opened up to. Sam’s only here because of you. The others are no different. You mean so much to all of us. You think if you needed to talk, that everyone wouldn’t drop everything to give you a shoulder to cry on, you thick-skulled moron?”

Steve chuckles under his breath, and scratches the back of his neck. 

“Not to mention, Holloway literally gets paid to listen to you. I’m not paying her for nothing.”

Steve lets out a heavy sigh. “I guess the thing on my mind most right now is Buck and I don’t want to force anyone, even Nadia, to sit there and listen to me bitch and moan about my feelings.”

“Did you just listen to a single--wait, feelings?” Tony says, stumbling over his own words as Steve’s catch up to him. Steve goes bright red and ducks his head. “You mean for Barnes? You have feelings for Barnes.”

“Keep it down, would you? I don’t need everyone and their mother knowing about this.”

Tony tips his head back and looks towards the ceiling. “Thor, buddy, if you can hear me now, zap me out of my misery before I have to spend another second dealing with this man.” Steve looks offended. There’s a beat of silence and Tony shrugs. “Guess he can’t hear me. Capsicle, my man, if you’re in love with Barnes, why don’t you make a move? You both obviously care about each other, and this one loves you,” he says with a gesture at Yana, still slumped against his chest. 

“I wouldn’t want to… I mean, even if I had the chance, I wouldn’t have wanted to mess up our friendship if it didn’t work out.”

“If you had the chance? What are you talking about?”

Steve raises an eyebrow. “Just something Shuri said.” Tony makes a ‘go on’ gesture with the hand that isn’t holding Yana steady. “I--Well she said that Clint and Bucky are dating. I guess they’re just keeping it quiet. I mean, I’m glad for them. They both deserve to be happy after everything they’ve been through, and they understand each other pretty well, and Yana adores Clint. It’s… I’m happy for them.” Steve forces a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Just keep that all quiet. They’re probably keeping to themselves for a reason.”

Tony nods and goes to open his mouth, but at that second, Sam enters the kitchen, and the moment is broken. 

Steve knows they won’t talk about this in the morning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> because someone brought it up: clint and bucky are not dating. shuri made a casual remark to steve at some point and steve, stressed out and sleep deprived as he is, misinterpreted it and now he’s wmo about it.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> matt is back to prep yana to testify

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yana talks very casually about her mistreatment at the hands of hydra in this chap so look out!

Matt Murdock returns to the Avengers compound on his own to prepare Yana for the fast approaching trial of the Winter Soldier. Steve thinks this is for the best. Knowing that Murdock is a vigilante gives him a sense of ease that he wouldn’t have with Stark’s legal team, as good as they are. The few brief conversations he’s had with Murdock and the knowledge of the work he’s done in Hell’s Kitchen only add to Steve’s growing trust in the man. 

Bucky does not share this feeling. The second Murdock shows up at the compound, Bucky’s on edge, pacing and running his flesh hand through his hair almost obsessively, and that’s even before Murdock takes Yana to the conference room to begin talking to her about the trial that she’ll most likely have to testify at. 

“You told me that she wouldn’t have to do this, Steve,” Bucky growls at him when Murdock finally comes into the common area to collect Yana. He stands politely off to the side, while Bucky confronts Steve. “When you found me, you said you’d keep the suits and sharks away from her.”

Steve stuffs his hands in his pockets and ducks his head in shame, because he had promised that. 

“I thought I could, but Tony and I have been trying everything and the prosecution won’t back down,” Steve says. 

Murdock interjects then, raising his hand to grab their attention. “Sergeant Barnes, Captain Rogers is correct. We didn’t want to bring a child onto the stand, let alone your daughter after all you both have been through, but the prosecution wants to call her as a witness. They’re not being as considerate because she is your daughter, because she came from HYDRA, which is no excuse, but it’s what we’re working with. I’m not going to push her, but I do need to prepare her to testify, so she won’t be caught unaware when the trial comes. She’ll be alright.”

Bucky’s shoulders shake, but he nods once, remembers that Murdock can’t see him, and grumbles out a quiet, “Fine,” and directs Yana to leave with Murdock. 

Bucky watches them leave, and then turns around and tries very hard to put a hole in the wall behind him. Steve catches his hand before it makes contact.

This is going to be a long day.

~*~

Matt takes the girl from Rogers and her father into the conference room they’d held their first meeting in, and sets out blank pieces of paper and a box of crayons on the table, so that Yana can distract herself while she speaks to him. 

He reaches for a chair then, and is surprised to find that Yana has pulled one out for him already and is poking at his knees to direct him towards it. He can’t help but smile as he folds his cane and sets it on the table next to him. 

He hears Yana scramble into the chair opposite him. “My dad says you wear those glasses cause you can’t see, is that true?”

Matt lets out a soft laugh and nods. “Yes, it is. I’ve been blind since I was very young.”

“Who did that to you?” she asks bluntly. 

“I was in an accident. No one did this to me on purpose,” he explains gently, folding his hands on the table in front of him. “Do you know why I’m here to talk to you today?”

Matt hears Yana shuffle the blank pages around and open the box of crayons, hears the soft scratch of new crayons on paper as she starts drawing something. 

“Yeah. My dad and Captain Steve said you’re here cause my dad is being tested, and I have to give a test too, cause of what HYDRA did to us.”

Matt smiles. “Almost. HYDRA made your dad do a lot of bad things--”

“Yeah. They made him kill people. I think I was s’pposed to do that too, but dad took me away first,” she states, matter-of-factly. 

Matt’s taken aback by her frankness. He’s seen kids who’ve grown up too fast, but this is something entirely different. “Well, yes. HYDRA made your father kill for them, and now the government wants to have a trial so they can have a judge decide whether he should have to face consequences for what he did while he was with HYDRA.”

“That’s stupid,” she says. The scratch of her crayons doesn’t stop for longer than the time it takes for her to swap out colors. “He didn’t wanna do it. He shouldn’t be punished for it if he didn’t wanna do it. They made him.”

“That’s what my job is. To prove to the judge that it wasn’t your father’s fault. And today is all about getting your ready to testify if you have to.”

“Why do I have to give a test?”

Matt huffs out a short laugh and shakes his head. “You’re not giving a test, Yana, you’re testifying. That means that the prosecutors, the lawyers like me who are working on the other side of the case, decided they want to be able to call you up during the trial to ask you some questions.”

“Oh,” Yana says, and for the first time, pauses her drawing. Matt’s pretty sure she looks up at him in confusion. “Why do I have to get ready? I’ll just tell them the truth.”

“Well they might try to trick you into saying something that could get your father in trouble. So I’m going to get you prepare you, so that you’re ready to answer that sort of question,” Matt explains. 

“Oh. Okay,” Yana says, and she turns back to her drawing.

“Alright then. Let’s start. Just answer what I ask you the way you would normally, and I’ll tell you if there’s anything you shouldn’t do or say. Your name is Yana Barnes?”

“My name’s just Yana. They said I didn’t need another name.”

“And who is this ‘they’ you’re talking about?”

“HYDRA. They’re the ones that made me,” Yana says, without a hint of emotion in her voice.

“Good,” Matt says. She hasn’t stumbled over a single word in the entire conversation they’ve had. She’s quick on her feet. That’s a good thing. “So your father is Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, otherwise known as the Winter Soldier, yes? Who is your mother?”

“I dunno. They made me in a lab. They just said it was important that I came from my dad. And he doesn’t like being called Winter Soldier. That’s not who he is.”

Smart kid, Matt thinks. Doesn’t seem to afraid to stand up for her family, even at a young age. 

“That’s good, Yana. That’s a very smart thing to say,” he commends.

He hears the rustle of fabric that indicates a shrug. “It’s the truth. My dad is not Soldat. Just like I’m not the Light.”

The Light? That’s news to Matt. “What do you mean you’re not the Light?”

“That’s what HYDRA called me. I’m Project: Light. They called me the Light, because I was going to help them show people the light, or something like that. It was dumb, I didn’t like when they said those sorts of things. They usually made me do things I didn’t like after that.”

Matt’s heart stills in his chest. “What sorts of things do you mean, Yana? Can you tell me?”

He hears her shrug again. “I dunno. I don’t remember. I think they all hurt a lot. They said that before they gave me this,” she says, and he hears her tap at some part of her own body.

“Yana, I can’t see what you’re pointing to. What’d they give you?”

“Oh, right. My tattoo.” She hops down from her chair and walks around the table to his side, taking his hand and bringing it up to her shoulder. “Feel it. It’s a star, like the one on dad’s arm.” Sure enough, Matt can feel the raised outline of a poorly done tattoo. 

“How long have you had that?” 

“Don’t remember,” she says casually, as though it isn’t a big deal that a six year old has a brand inked into her skin. “A while. After, they use the machine, to see if it would work on me like it worked on my dad, I think.” She hops into the chair across from Matt again, and Matt lets out a breath. 

“What machine?” Matt asks, because he’s certain the prosecution will ask it of her, and of Barnes. 

“The one that takes your memories. It crackles a whole bunch and they put these weird thingies on your face and the back of your head and then it hurts a lot for a while and then you don’t remember lots of things for a while.”

Matt nods. “Okay. Yana, there are going to be a lot of people in the courtroom when you have to testify. Are you going to be comfortable talking about all of this in front of them, the same way you’re talking with me?”

Yana pauses her coloring again. “Yeah. Why not? It’s just the truth. No one’s going to send me and my dad back to HYDRA if we talk about it, right?”

“Of course not,” Matt’s quick to reassure her.

“Then it’s fine. Why wouldn’t I talk about it?”

“I just wanted to check to be sure.”

“Oh. Okay. That’s nice of you. You’re a nice man, Mr. Matt,” Yana says very definitively. 

“Thank you, Yana. Okay. Now, can you tell me a little bit about how your dad found you? They’re definitely going to ask you about that.”

“Okay. He found me a year ago. Maybe a little more. And I was confused, cause the handlers said I wasn’t s’pposed to meet Soldat yet, but then he said he was going to take me away and make sure I was safe, so I went with him, and he was really nice to me. He said he was going to give me to someone who’d take care of me, but then I got to stay with him.”

“And what was it like, staying with him before Captain Rogers found you both?”

“We moved a lot. I didn’t like it, but dad said it was to keep us safe, so I did it.” Yana sounds entirely unbothered by this fact. 

“What has it been like, having Sergeant Barnes as your father?”

Yana pauses her coloring again. “Sometimes he wakes me up at night, cause he’s having nightmares and he’s loud, and sometimes he has--Uncle Clint said they’re called flashbacks, like nightmares but when you’re awake. That happens sometimes, and it’s scary but I go to my room and then he comes to get me when he’s better.”

“He’s never hurt you during one of these flashbacks has he?”

He hears Yana shake her head. “Nope. He’s always afraid about that, but he keeps me safe. He wouldn’t hurt me. Oh hey! Lucky!” Yana exclaims, just as Matt hears the clicking of dog’s claws against the hard floor. “Hey, Mr. Matt, can Lucky stay with us while we talk? He’s a good dog, I promise!”

Matt can’t help his smile. For all this poor girl has suffered through, she’s still managed to retain so much of her child-like wonder, even about simple things, like the dog Clint had insisted on bringing back to the compound with him when he came to collect Matt the first time, saying he needed a favor from his favorite “dumpster buddy”. Matt was waiting for the day Clint let go of the way they’d first met. He didn’t think that day would be any day soon.

“Of course Lucky can stay,” Matt says, and he hears Yana slip out of her seat to plop down on the floor next to the dog. Lucky’s tail starts thumping against the floor happily. “Are you up for some more questions?”

“Sure, I guess,” Yana agrees, “What do you think Lucky?”

The dog barks in response to her and she laughs in delight. Matt continues on with his questions. Yana doesn’t falter for an answer once. 

~*~

It’s well into the afternoon when FRIDAY announces that Murdock and Yana have returned to the common area, and Steve has to stop Bucky from sprinting there as soon as he hears it. 

“You have a very smart kid, Sergeant Barnes,” Murdock says as they approach. “I don’t think you have a thing to worry about when the prosecution calls her to testify.”

“That’s not giving a test. They should change what it’s called,” Yana says, looking very disgruntled about this fact. Lucky is half in her lap where she sits on the floor by the couch, letting Yana scratch his belly. 

Steve laughs at her comment and leans down to pet the dog too. With his daughter back in his sight, he sees Bucky begin to visibly relax. 

“Thank you, Mr. Murdock,” Steve says, because Bucky’s still shut up as tight as a clam. 

“Please, it’s just Matt. I’ve got to get going, but I’ll be seeing you all very soon.”

That makes Bucky tense up again, but he still manages a tight, “Thank you,” before Matt leaves to meet Tony to head back to the city. 

“It’ll be okay, Buck. Matt’s a good lawyer. Stark’s team is great. Everything is going to be fine.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything in response, and Steve desperately, desperately hopes that he hasn’t just lied.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> time for a trial

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is double the normal length of a chapter, and is also kinda heavy so tread lightly.  
> i have very little knowledge of my own country's legal system, so this is playing fast and loose with that, and we only get to see testimonies instead of all of the court proceedings.

The day of Bucky’s court date rolls around way, way too quickly. 

Before they know it, Bucky, Yana, Steve, Tony, Clint, Natasha and Sam are packing their bags and heading for New York City, where Helen Cho and Nadia Holloway have already gotten comfortable in the hotel that Tony’s rented out most of for the next week. 

There’s a day of settling in and preparing them all for court and talking Bucky down from a panic attack and then the next morning, bright and early, there are federal agents there to escort them all to the courthouse. Steve adjusts his tie, smooths a few stray baby hairs out of Yana’s face, and sweeps her into his arms, so she doesn’t have to watch what happens next. 

The federal agents lock a dampening cuff around Bucky’s metal arm to keep it disabled, and the strain of the dead weight immediately begins to show on Bucky’s face, but he doesn’t say a word. Tony’s the one that insists they allow him to get the metal arm into a sling so that Bucky isn’t so uncomfortable. Steve could kiss him for that. They let Tony wrangle the limb into a sling he brought along, always prepared, and then they cuff Bucky’s other wrist to the metal one. It’s certainly not the most comfortable looking position, but the agents relax once it’s done, and are suddenly a lot less harsh in their treatment of Bucky, so Steve keeps his mouth shut. 

They insist on taking Bucky in a separate car. Tony insists that they do not protest that course of action. Bucky tenses at the prospect of being separated from Yana but he doesn’t protest either. Instead, he presses a kiss to Yana’s forehead and smiles at her and leaves with the agents. 

Tony leads the rest of them out to their car a few minutes after Bucky’s taken from the room. 

They fit themselves into an Escalade, Nat and Clint stuffing themselves into the far back seats, so they don’t have to separate. Their nerves are frayed enough as is. Nat spends the entire car ride over fixing Clint’s tie and trying to smooth his hair down. Sam and Steve, Yana settled in the seat between them, try to keep her mind off the current happenings so she doesn’t get too overwhelmed. Tony’s uncharacteristically silent. 

They pull up to the courthouse and Tony curses. 

Someone must have leaked the news about Bucky’s trial to the press. It’s a goddamn zoo outside the confines of their car and the one in front of them. Steve tenses, and notices Sam do the same out of the corner of his eye. Yana picks up on the sudden shift in atmosphere and goes silent. 

“Alright,” their driver says gruffly, “Doctors Cho and Holloway are already inside. We’ll help you out getting through the crowd as best we can, but our priority is Sergeant Barnes. You’re mostly on your own. Godspeed,” he mutters, and then he’s out of the car. He opens the door for Steve, and puts down the seat so Nat and Clint can get out after, but as soon as that’s done, he’s at the door to the first car, tugging Bucky out the door and holding out an arm to keep reporters back. 

Steve holds Yana tightly to his chest, trying to shield her from the cameras. Other agents get Bucky through the horde of reporters rather quickly, but Steve can see in the set of his shoulders that it’s still gotten to him, that he’s even more uncomfortable now. 

Steve steels himself, and Sam leads the way through the crowd. 

“Captain Rogers, have the Avengers been harboring a fugitive?”

“Captain Rogers, how does it feel knowing that your old friend is a murderer now?”

“Captain Rogers, whose child is that?”

“Mr. Stark why is the Stark legal team helping with this case?”

“We’ve heard rumors that the Winter Soldier has a daughter, is that her, Captain Rogers?”

“What’s her name?”

“Who’s the kid?”

“Hey!” Tony shouts finally, one they’re almost entirely through the mob. “Shut up for a second! If you want to know what we have to say, you have to be able to hear me. First of all, this is a very sensitive case, and discussing any details of it would be unprofessional and would be ill-advised, considering the trial hasn’t even started yet. Second, the Stark legal team is working on this case, because Sergeant James Barnes is connected to the Avengers, and I only allow the best for my friends. Third, learn the meaning of privacy. This child is six years old for god’s sake. Have some decency, you vultures.” And he turns on his heel and marches away, leaving a mass of reporters calling after them. 

Steve doesn’t know how to thank him. 

Matt greets them outside the courtroom, leading them in to their seats and explaining how things are going to go, and then leaving to convene with Tony’s lawyers. 

And that’s it. They’re in the belly of the beast. 

~*~

The first day, they make opening statements. The prosecution is brutal. Steve can hardly listen to all of the things he has to say about Bucky.

“The man sitting before us has spent the past seventy years murdering innocent people and swaying the course of history for a terrorist organization. He has caused the deaths of ninety people that we know of, and committed treason against the great nation he swore to serve all those years ago. How, after all of these acts, can he be classified as anything but a terrorist as well? The Winter Soldier is a danger to everyone around him, and he needs to face the consequences of his actions. A connection to the Avengers should not allow these heinous crimes to go unpunished.”

Matt stands then to deliver the defense’s opening remarks, and Steve is suddenly even more grateful that Clint decided to invite him onto the case. 

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. You’ve been told that you are here for the trial of the Winter Soldier, the assassin who has escaped notice and capture for decades. But I am here to tell you that you’ve been mislead. The man you see sitting before you is not the Winter Soldier. This is Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. His friends call him Bucky. Sergeant Barnes was brainwashed and tortured into becoming the Winter Soldier, programming and conditioning that he has fought very hard to be free of, and that he is finally moving forward from. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to look at this man, and consider all that he has been through, and try to give Sergeant James Barnes a chance. Thank you.”

They call Helen to the stand first. They ask her questions and she answers with her own knowledge and information Shuri passed off to her.

“My name is Helen Cho. I am technically a medical doctor on staff with the Avengers, but I mostly do research, occasionally with Mr. Stark, and with Dr. Banner, before he disappeared.

“No, I have not been able to examine Sergeant Barnes myself, but I was able to confer with the woman who did.

“The Princess of Wakanda.

“This was after she had removed the command words that HYDRA had implanted in his mind. When recited correctly, the words would cause Sergeant Barnes to revert back into the Soldier. Mindless and unable to refuse an order. Princess Shuri was able to successfully undo this programming.

“She performed a thorough examination of Sergeant Barnes’ prosthetic as well, yes. She found that it had been crudely fused to his shoulder. During this process, we discovered an implant that caused Sergeant Barnes to have a seizure, and when we removed it, we discovered that anaesthetics do not affect him, with his enhanced metabolism. 

“Yes, the arm was attached while he was awake. 

“I am not a psychiatrist, that line of questioning is best left to Dr. Holloway, but from a medical standpoint, I think the only way to say it is that Sergeant Barnes has been used like a human lab rat. All evidence suggests that he was treated inhumanely for every moment he was under HYDRA’s influence. I don’t know a single living being that should feasibly be able to survive what he did. The fact that he’s here is a miracle.

“Yes, that is my expert opinion.”

They call up Nadia next, and the doctor sits on the stand with her back straight and straight up murder in her eyes.

“My name is Nadia Holloway. I have been providing therapy services for the defendant’s daughter, and I’ve recently become the full-time therapist for the Avengers.

“I have not been able to speak with Sergeant Barnes one on one yet, no, but I have had the pleasure of speaking with his daughter, Yana, regularly. 

“Yana is six years old.

“She was removed from HYDRA by her father. 

“Yes, I would consider him her father, even with the unconventional method of her ‘birth’. He’s cared for her for almost a year and a half, and kept her safe from the people who treated her as sub-human. 

“From what I was able to gather from my conversations with Yana and from what I’ve been able to observe in Sergeant Barnes, I would say that they are both suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Sergeant Barnes has one of the most severe cases I have ever seen. 

“I would have to share Dr. Cho’s opinion that Sergeant Barnes and Yana Barnes being here is a miracle. The fact that they both managed to escape HYDRA’s control and reestablish themselves as individuals is incredible, and it speaks to their sheer willpower, that they are able to continue to make progress despite what they are up against. 

“Excuse me, counsellor, I believe that is a wildly inappropriate question.

“No. I believe that if he continues on the path he has put himself on with the Avengers at his side, and enters into some form of therapy, Sergeant Barnes would not be a danger to himself or others.”

They call Nat to the stand the next day. 

“My name is Natalia Alianovna Romanova. I am a close friend of the defendant.

“I first met James Barnes when Captain Rogers brought him back to the compound, about a month and a half ago.

“Oh, the Winter Soldier? I met him for the first time years ago, when I was still a Red Room operative. 

“Yes the Red Room was an organization that operated closely with HYDRA on many things. They subscribed to a similar belief system as HYDRA.

“Counsellor, I’m not on trial here. My name was already cleared. 

“Yes. I was brought into S.H.I.E.L.D. by Agent Barton, and after I was cleared of my programming, I became an agent. 

“The Red Room’s programming wasn’t the same as HYDRA’s. They let us keep our memories. They wanted us to know who we were, so we could know we could never return to being that. I didn’t have programming embedded in my head that took my will away like James did, and I was still just as far under their control. People like the Red Room and HYDRA… their operatives, their assets, we’re nothing to them. We’re tools to use as they see fit. James was a special asset, but he was no different. To the people who controlled us, we weren’t people.”

They call Clint up next. Clint demands they have a sign language interpreter there for him and then proceeds to only use sign language with the prosecution. 

“My name is Clinton Francis Barton, and I am a close friend of the defendant.

“I had no interaction with James Barnes or the Winter Soldier until I came home from a mission one day and found him in the living room.

“No, I’ve never been afraid of Bucky while I’ve been around him.

“Yeah, I’ve seen him at his worst. 

“Look, I’ll admit, I’ve got some experience with ex-brainwashed Soviet assassins. I was responsible for the Black Widow’s rehabilitation when she joined S.H.I.E.L.D.. I’ve been around the block before, I’ve seen a lot, and Bucky still managed to throw new stuff my way. But I stand by what I said. I was never afraid of him. I’m a guy who runs around with a bunch of sticks to defend himself, I’m not exactly the Incredible Hulk, here, but Bucky has never once made me truly fear for my safety or the safety of those around me. There’s been a little worry, sure. But even when he was in the middle of an intense flashback, or fresh out of a nightmare, he’s never made me fear like that.

“Yes. I’ve been present for eight separate episodes. 

“No.

“I said no. PTSD is a serious issue that people need help for. Being brainwashed and made to do things against your own will is traumatic in a way you will never understand unless you’ve lived it. And Barnes lived that for seventy years. His experience is different, more intimate, personal, and far longer lasting, but Barnes is no different than any other veteran. He deserves the help and treatment any of them would be afforded, not a prison cell.”

Tony is called to the stand next. He keeps his sunglasses on and glares over the top of them at the prosecutors. 

“My name is Anthony Edward Stark. I’m a close friend of the defendant.

“Well, the first time I ever met James Barnes was when Captain Rogers brought him to the compound for the first time. But recently, we discovered that we have an earlier connection than that.

“Oh, what’s the connection? Barnes murdered my parents.

“I agreed to testify because I have a unique perspective on this situation. Am I angry and upset with the Winter Soldier for killing my parents? Yeah. There are words to describe how that feels. Am I mad at Barnes? Absolutely not. 

“I’m not mad at him, because it wasn’t him. Hell, the guy didn’t even know what he’d done until a couple weeks ago. 

“Yes. I have a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. I took a look at the schematics for the machine that was used on Barnes during his HYDRA stint and the best way I can describe it is barbaric. The same for his arm. That thing is incredibly advanced for when he got it, but it’s horrible. When it was disabled for the proceedings today, I had to fashion a sling for it because it’s so heavy and put so much strain on his body. 

“Look, I’m surprised anyone could survive being stuck in that thing for any amount of time, even a super soldier. By all means, it should have killed him. And in a sense it did, it killed James Barnes for seventy years, and he’s only recently begun to come back.”

Steve kicks off the proceedings on the third day. He’s nervous and fidgety the entire time, and tries desperately to hide it.

“My name is Steven Grant Rogers. I’ve known the defendant since we were children in the twenties. 

“I believed that Bucky Barnes was dead when I watched him fall down the side of a cliff in the middle of World War Two. 

“No I had no knowledge of the Soldier’s existence until the first time I faced him, just before the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.. 

“I didn’t know that Bucky was the Winter Soldier until the very end of the second fight I was up against him.

“Yes, I did face the Winter Soldier in combat, on more than one occasion.

“No, I would hardly hold him responsible for the Soldier’s actions.

“Yes, I was in the hospital for a while after that. The reason I was in the hospital instead of the bottom of the Potomac is sitting right in front of me.

“Yeah, I’ll elaborate. We might have started the incident at the Triskelion on opposing sides, but by the end of it, Bucky managed to recognize me and break through seventy years of torture and brainwashing to save me, to drag me out of the river and make sure I lived to fight another day.

“No, I’m not speaking entirely unbiasedly, but I testified the same way for Agent Barton when he was on trial for his actions under Loki’s influence before the Battle of New York, and he was all but a stranger then. If someone else asked me to testify for a similar situation, I’d say the same. I’ll tell you what I said at Agent Barton’s trial, and what I’d say in any other case. A man cannot be held accountable for the actions of another, because then, the one truly responsible doesn’t face the proper consequences. Regardless of the fact that it was Sergeant Barnes’ body, it was not his mind. I think that’s a very important distinction.”

They call Sam up after Steve. 

“My name is Samuel Thomas Wilson. I am a close friend of the defendant.

“I’ve had the same experiences with the Winter Soldier as Captain Rogers has, up until the point where we brought him and his daughter to the compound. 

“Yes, that means I faced him in the field. Not pleasant. I’m not super soldier. 

“Oh, no. Not at all. 

“Before I joined up with the Avengers, I worked at the VA, helping out veterans who are dealing with PTSD. Barnes is just like all those other vets. His case is probably the worst I’ve ever seen, sure, but he’s no different than them. Just, instead of seeing IEDs and getting jumpy at loud noises like the rest of us, he’s reliving seventy years of hell. 

“No. There’s an obvious split between Barnes and the Winter Soldier. And with the work that Princess Shuri did for him, there’s no chance of him reverting to the Soldier. That part of him’s been removed. He’s free of it. Sure, there’ll be flashbacks and nightmares, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary for someone who’s been through a traumatic experience.”

The fourth day, the call Yana to the stand. Every muscle in Bucky’s body goes rigid, and does not relax until she’s back in Steve’s arms after she’s done. 

“My name’s Yana.

“No that’s it. 

“Yeah, he’s my dad. They made me from him.

“No. My handlers said I didn’t need any other name. My dad was the Winter Soldier and I was the Light and that was all we needed to be called. Sometimes they called me Yana. That’s what dad and Captain Steve and everyone else calls me.

“HYDRA made me so they could have another soldier.

“My dad saved me from them.

“Yeah, he saved me. They were real mean while I was there. 

“Well, they gave me this tattoo and told me it made me theirs, that didn’t feel good. They tried out the machine they used on my dad on me once, too. And they did other stuff that hurt a whole bunch sometimes. I don’t really remember it all. I know how to use a knife now though!

“No, dad says I shouldn’t touch dangerous things like that now unless I really, really have to, like if someone’s gonna hurt me and I don’t have another choice.

“He’s a good dad. Sometimes he has nightmares that wake me up, but when that happens, Captain Steve keeps me company till I fall back asleep, so it’s okay. 

“No, he’s never hurt me. Why would he do that?”

Finally, they call Bucky to the stand for questioning. He looks haggard, like his true age has caught up to him in the last few days. 

“My name is Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, also known as the Winter Soldier.

“I remember being dragged from the base of that cliff to some lab somewhere. I was half dead from blood loss, cause I lost my arm somewhere along the way there, but I remember that much. And then being awake for them attaching the metal arm. It hurt, a lot, but that’s all hazy. It’s hard to remember that far back, with how often they scrambled my brain. 

“Yeah, my kid mentioned it, before. There was the machine that they used. A few hundred thousand volts straight to the face will do the trick. The used the machine to take my memory of the person I really was, and they had those command words to make me… they’d say them, and all I’d be able to say was ‘ready to comply’, and I’d do whatever they wanted of me. 

“No. There was no way to fight it, after a while. At first, I did, I fought them tooth and nail, but a few years of severe torture and some brainwashing will take the fight right out of anyone. 

“You saw all the records about me earlier, do I have to recount all of that for you again?

“The helicarriers, I was ordered to kill Captain America and make sure those carriers stayed in the air. But then I… I was fighting him and I started having these flashes, every time he opened his mouth, I was remembering little things and then he refused to fight me, and I got all of it, and suddenly he wasn’t my mission anymore, he was my friend, and I just walked away.

“No, that’s not… I wouldn’t say that’s when I definitively stopped being the Soldier. I was laying low for a couple months, recovering what memories I could, but there were still bits and pieces of him. Instincts, habits I couldn’t shake.

“What happened? I remembered that they’d taken my DNA.

“No, I didn’t consent to it. But they didn’t care. I remember two of the doctors discussing it over me, and they said my consent didn’t matter because I wasn’t a person anymore. 

“Right. I remembered that they’d taken my DNA. That was… I looked for weeks to find her, but I did. My daughter. It was so strange to think about, that I had this kid that they’d just created, like it was nothing, just to use her the same way they’d used me. I couldn’t let that happen.

“No, I didn’t go there with the intent to rescue her. I was going to save her. It’s different. It was an instinct left over from the Soldier. HYDRA trained me to tie up loose ends by killing them. They didn’t care about the damage they left behind. And I was going to do that. I was going to take her out before they could ever use her the way they used me, but I looked at this little girl they made from me and I… I couldn’t. That was the first time besides Steve that I really couldn’t. I think that’s when I really stopped being the soldier.

“When I decided to take her out of the facility, I thought I would get her out, lay low, and find a way to get her to the Avengers so they could look out for her, but then she grew on me. I couldn’t let her go. She’s… god, she’s even learned to help me with nightmares as much as I help her with hers. She’s everything to me.

“Yeah contrary to popular belief, I’m not soulless anymore.”

Closing statements follow Bucky’s testimony, and Steve wants nothing more than to get out of this place and never return by that point.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the thing you have heard over the course of this trial have been terrible, that is certain. We have all been horrified to hear about the events surrounding Sergeant Barnes’ life. Now consider how uncomfortable you are, having just heard about them. Sergeant Barnes had to live through them. Sergeant Barnes had his body and mind violated regularly, for seven decades. He was experimented on, and had his body modified without his consent, had his memories and his free will stripped away, HYDRA even went so far as to create a child from his DNA without his consent. The Winter Soldier may have committed atrocities. But the Winter Soldier is not James Barnes. James Barnes is another victim of the Winter Soldier, as plain as that. Sergeant Barnes was taken in the line of duty, and held captive for seventy years. He is the longest missing prisoner of war in United States history. I believe it’s time we all welcome him home. Thank you,” Matt says, and takes his seat again. 

~*~

The jury deliberates for three and a half days before they deliver their verdict.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am not sorry for the cliff hanger.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a verdict

Steve spends the entire three days that the jury is deliberating feeling like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Bucky’s convicted, doesn’t know how he’ll live, knowing he let his best friend down like that. New York doesn’t have a death penalty anymore, but if Bucky’s convicted, Steve knows he’ll be sent to some new facility Senator Ross called the Raft, and Steve knows the Raft is not the sort of place you come back from. He can’t imagine how Clint’ll feel either. He doesn’t want to go down that road though. Too much to unpack there.

They made a plan for this, just in case. Bucky doesn’t really have anything to his name, so he didn’t need to decide who would be in charge of his affairs if he were convicted. But they do have papers already filled out, awaiting a final signature from Bucky, just in case, to give Steve and Clint joint custody of Yana. Worst case scenario. 

Steve can’t help but think about how that’d play out and want to laugh. The thought of he and Clint working together to parent a little girl, especially with their lines of work, is beyond comical and Steve almost has to stop himself from bursting into hysterics in the silence of the courtroom as the jury deliberates and deliberates and deliberates and delib--

When the judge calls court back into session and the jurors file back into the room, Steve swears his heart stops beating in his chest. 

“Foreman,” the judge addresses the head juror as he stands. “What verdict have you come to?”

The foreman clears his throat and looks down at the paper in his hand. One sheet of flimsy white paper holding Bucky’s fate. 

“On twenty-nine counts of first degree murder, sixty-one counts of first-degree manslaughter, and treason,” he says and Steve feels the entire room come to a screeching halt. The slight pause in the foreman’s words has Steve’s heart racing and his breath stopping and his world crumbling around him, before anything even been said. 

He pulls Yana a little closer to his side, and shares a look of thinly concealed panic with Clint. Sam puts and arm on his shoulder, Nat reaches over Yana and places a hand on his knee. Tony gives him a reassuring look, Nadia and Helen look well composed. Steve feels like this, second hand, with all of these people there to support him. 

If he feels this bad, how bad does Bucky feel?

“We find the defendant not guilty. Welcome home, Sergeant Barnes.”

Steve feels like his world starts moving again. 

Not guilty. 

_ Not guilty. _

Bucky’s free. 

He’s cleared. He’s not going to jail. 

The judge says a few more words that Steve can’t hear at all, it’s drowned out by the ringing in his ears as he processes what he’s just heard.

Steve can’t stop the hysterical laugh that bubbles out of his chest as soon as the gavel hits the bench and the judge dismisses the court, and he sweeps Yana off the bench and into a near crushing hug. 

“You hear that sweetheart?” Steve asks her, holding her tight, unwilling to let go. He’s buzzing with excitement.

“What’s it mean, Captain Steve?” Yana asks, confused.

Steve leans her back just enough that he can look at her face and beams at her. “Your dad’s free, kiddo. He’s free, he’s coming home with us. We get to bring him home,” Steve explains and hugs her tight again. Yana returns the hug this time, throwing her arms around Steve’s shoulders and gripping his shirt in the back. Steve’s certain that he feels the fabric of his shirt getting wet, but he doesn’t say anything. He can’t imagine how hard this entire process has been on Yana, thinking that she could lose her dad and be left with people who were functionally strangers, as much as she liked them. They’re happy and relieved tears, he’s sure. He won’t call attention to it. She’s a little girl. She shouldn’t have to keep her composure.

Bucky’s been cleared and they get to bring him home now, for good, and Yana’s not going to lose her dad and Steve’s not going to lose his best friend again. The feels like the closest to really winning that they’ve gotten in a very long time. It feels good.

Sam claps a hand on his shoulder, and Nat hug him from behind, a fleeting touch but there all the same, and Clint gives him a light punch on the arm, and Tony, for the first time in the past six weeks, actually smiles. 

Helen and Nadia congratulate them and then make their way out of the courthouse, and Steve doesn’t blame them for wanting to get out of there. 

Steve looks up to where Bucky is still sitting next to Matt, letting the bailiff uncuff his flesh hand and then his metal one, sees the tension bleed out of Bucky’s shoulders as the arm becomes functional again, no longer just dead weight dragging him down. He removes the sling quickly, and turns to say something to Matt, a dazed expression still on his face. 

Steve wants to go to him, to cross the courtroom and hand Yana over to him and hug him and welcome him back. But Tony grabs his arm then and says, “The press will be going nuts outside. If we go out now and answer a few questions, they’ll settle down a little bit, make it easier for Barnes and the kid to get out. Hand her over to Clint for now, lets go sate the vultures.”

Steve reluctantly agrees. 

As much as he wants to congratulate Bucky, he wants to make getting out of here as easy as possible for him and Yana, and Captain America and Iron Man answering questions for the press is likely the perfect distraction. Tony knows his way around stuff like this. Steve decides to listen to him. 

He passes Yana over to Clint and explains to Nat and Sam where they’re off to and then slips out of the building with Tony. 

As predicted, reporters have swarmed on the steps of the courthouse. 

“Mr. Stark!” 

“Captain Rogers!” 

“Have the jury delivered a verdict?” 

“Where is the Winter Soldier?” 

“What about the little girl?”

“Is it true that the Winter Soldier has a child?”

“Everyone shut up! One at a time!” Tony demands, and the crowd goes silent. “You, in the green.”

“Mr. Stark, Captain Rogers, has the jury delivered their verdict?”

“Yes, they have,” Tony answers.

“Care to share what that verdict is?”

Tony rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses. Steve can’t see it, but he knows it happened. “Sergeant Barnes has been cleared of all charges. Next. Yeah, black jacket, snazzy bowtie.”

“Mr. Stark, Captain Rogers, you are both Avengers, who’ve dedicated so much to helping people. Why did you then put so much effort into defending the Winter Soldier, a known killer?”

“Well that’s a stupid question,” Tony grumbles and Steve cuts him off there. 

“James Barnes is not the Winter Soldier. That is someone he was forced to become against his will. We helped defend an innocent man. Next question. In the blue, there.”

“Captain Rogers, at the start of this trial, you were seen entering the courthouse with a young girl. Any comment on the rumors that the girl is Barnes’ daughter?”

“Hey, how about this,” Tony says, his voice laced with contempt. “If you attempt to invade the privacy of a child again, I’ll find a way to ruin your career. Have some basic human decency. No more questions about the kid. Next. You, red shirt.”

And so they go, for what feels like forever. Steve doesn’t know how Tony can do this as often as he does for Stark Industries. The press is fucking exhausting. 

But for Bucky and Yana’s sakes, it’s worth it. Steve can play the show pony for a little while so that they are spared the attention. 

It pays off when out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Clint helping Yana into a car with Natasha. He wonders where Bucky is, until he feels a tap at his shoulder, around the same time that the entire crowd of reporters simultaneously shove their microphones and recorders forward, and also take a few shuffling steps backward. 

Steve turns to see Bucky standing just behind him, Sam at his back, arms crossed like he’s playing bodyguard. 

Bucky doesn’t breathe a word. He hardly lets Steve turn to face him fully, actually, before there’s an arm at Steve’s back, and he’s being literally swept off his feet. 

Well, that’s an exaggeration. He’s swept of one of his feet. Bucky gets a grip on Steve and dips him like they’re posing for a cheesy picture, and Steve’s almost about to ask what is happening when Bucky leans in. 

He kisses Steve like there’s no tomorrow, like they’re not being watched by reporters and cameras, like this won’t be on the front page of every newspaper, magazine and website the next morning. 

And Steve kisses him back like his goddamn life depends on it, like he’s a dying man and Bucky is his salvation, like their whole world has come down to this minute, this moment, this millisecond. 

Bucky pulls back far too soon for Steve’s taste, and smiles a smile that is so painfully Bucky it hits Steve down to his very core. “I thought I’d try to keep my winning streak going.”

Steve just stares up at him dumbly for a second before whispering, “I thought you were dating Clint.”

Bucky knocks Steve upside the head with his flesh hand, but he’s laughing while he does it, and that is music to Steve’s ears. 

“You’re dumber than you look, Stevie,” Bucky murmurs, and then he kisses Steve again, with the sound of camera flashes as a soundtrack. 

~*~

Bucky’s spur of the moment, impulse decision earns him and Steve every front page known to man the next day. It’s all the new stations are talking about, and all the gossip sites are printing. 

CNN tries to really cover what details have been released about the trials. EXTRA ‘covers’ the trial, but really only talks about Bucky kissing Steve. Fox and Friends releases a scathing criticism of Captain America’s morals that has Tony and Clint in stitches.

The only thing that makes Clint laugh more is when Steve admits he thought Bucky and Clint were dating. 

Steve’s pretty sure he’ll never live that one down, but he doesn’t particularly care. He’s got his best guy at his side. 

Nothing else much matters. 


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter yana's 'tutor'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is pretty much all fluff! finally!

A week after Bucky’s cleared, they hire a tutor for Yana.

Well, a week after Bucky’s cleared, Bucky says that he’s going to stick around here for a while, and they decide that Yana should probably go to school starting that September. And then they sit on that and don’t do anything for another week. 

Then, Tony suggests hiring someone to make sure Yana can pass an entrance exam for the first grade. 

She’s a smart kid, can read and write way ahead of most kids her age, and in several different languages to boot. Her intelligence isn’t the problem, there’s no doubt she’ll fit in in a first grade classroom. Her problem is that she mixes up what language she should be speaking or writing in, if she initiates the conversation, or starts writing unprompted. She’s fluent in English, Russian, and very nearly fluent in German, and she’s able to speak broken Mandarin and Spanish, and things have a tendency to get muddled in her mind, they’ve noticed. 

So, Tony suggests bringing in a tutor to help her focus on the English she’ll need for a placement test, and Bucky can’t help but agree. 

Tony says they need a bright mind, who could keep it quiet that they’re working with Yana, and says that he has the perfect candidate, and then disappears for two days. 

Steve almost thinks he’s forgotten about it and gotten sidetracked with some project or another when he returns. 

With a child. 

“Everyone,” he addresses the room, full of Steve, Bucky, Yana, and Sam, like he’s addressing a crowd. “Pepper says hello and that she misses you all, and that she can’t wait until things with Stark Industries calm down enough for her to move up here with us all. Pipsqueak, Auntie Pepper says she’s excited to be able to spend more time with you soon. Cap, she says don’t watch Fox News tonight not that you were planning to anyway.”

Steve shrugs that one off. It’s been two weeks and the media outlets still haven’t dropped the story about him and Bucky. Apparently America’s icon kissing another man is a big deal or something. Either way. He’s not too bothered by Pepper’s message. Let them talk. 

What he is concerned about, however, is the  _ child _ that Tony has standing just behind him, staring wide eyed into the room. 

“Tony, did you kidnap him or something? Who’s the kid?” Steve finally asks, unable to wait for an explanation. 

Tony looks up from his phone like he’s not sure what Steve’s talking about, glances back at the kid, and raises his eyebrows in understanding. “Oh. This is Peter Parker. He’s Spiderman. He’s here to stay for the summer. He’s gonna make sure Yana can handle a placement test that I’ve arranged at the end of the summer for a very nice private school in the town we technically are in the zipcode for.”

Peter shifts the backpack that’s slung over his shoulder, and steps tentatively forward, extending his hand to Steve. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Captain America, sir,” he says, nerves shaking his voice. 

“Just Steve will do fine, kid. It’s nice to meet you too, Peter. You’re a lot younger than I thought Spiderman would be. How old are you?”

“Uh, fifteen, Mr. Steve. Uh. Steve. Just Steve. Yeah. Fifteen,” Peter says, shuffling back a step.

“Peter, relax,” Steve says, clapping him on the shoulder. 

Bucky, at the same time, says, “Only fifteen? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“No, no, sir, my school just let out for the summer and Mr. Stark talked to my aunt and told her he selected me for an internship I applied for, even though I didn’t apply, and she agreed, if I wanted to go. But then he said that what he really wanted was for me to come help out somebody’s kid, and maybe train a little bit with the Avengers and get used to being around you guys so that when I get older, maybe one day I could join the team. So here I am!”

Steve can’t help but smile at the kid’s enthusiasm and the sense of innocence radiating off of him. If the kid’s got superpowers, something must’ve happened to him for him to get them, and he’s sure that the kid’s got his problems, no one’s got a perfect life, after all, but Peter’s got this sort of optimism surrounding him that Steve appreciates. 

“You’re a child,” Bucky grumbles, shifting to lean forward a little. The movement reveals his metal arm and Peter leaps into the air a little in surprise, causing Steve’s hand to falls from his shoulder.

“Woah! You have a metal arm! That’s so cool. That means… oh, you’re the Winter Soldier, right? Awesome. And you’re Falcon, right?” Peter turns to address Sam. Bucky looks like he’s tensed up, but Peter’s mostly positive reaction to him hasn’t set him as on edge as it could have. Steve counts it as a win. “I can’t believe I’m meeting the Avengers. Mr. Stark, thank you for thinking of me, for real, this is incredible.”

Tony looks up from his phone again and nods at Peter, smiling in a soft sort of way that Steve hasn’t seen on him before. “Sure thing, kid. Now look, you’re here to observe, and tutor the short stack, okay? I’ll have FRIDAY give you access to the common areas and the training facilities, but you are not here to go through full on Avenger training. This is like a training wheels experience. I’ve gotta run, Pepper needs something from me. Steve can show you around, right?”

Steve nods, and then Tony is gone. 

“You want to go down to the training room and spar a little later? I’ve seen a little footage of what you can do, I think you can handle it,” Steve says, as soon as Tony leaves the room. Peter nods eagerly, and Steve smiles. “For now, we’ll introduce you to Yana and then get you settled in.” Peter nods again. At the mention of her name, Yana perks up.

“Hey Captain Steve!” she says, as though she hasn’t been sitting in a room with him for the past hour or more. 

“Hey Yana. This is Peter. Peter, this is Yana, Bucky’s daughter. She’ll be starting school in the fall. She’s very smart, but she speaks five different languages, and they get scrambled in her head sometimes. Tony says you’re a smart kid too?” Steve questions. 

Peter lowers himself to his knees next to Yana, where’s she’s sitting on the floor, coloring on the back of a paper that’s actually probably pretty important. 

“I’m top of my class at Midtown Science and Tech. I’m mostly into chemistry and tech stuff. I developed my web fluid myself, and I’m trying to go to college for mechanical engineering. But I’m doing really well in English too. I can definitely help Yana out with whatever she needs. If you’re okay with it, Sergeant Barnes. I don’t know if Mr. Stark told you about me first, and she’s your daughter, I don’t want to overstep any boundaries or anything,” Peter says with a nervous glance at Bucky.

“Call me Bucky, kid. And if Stark thinks you’re a good pick, I’ll trust him on it. As long as this isn’t getting in the way of you living your own life,” Bucky says, a flash of something darting across his face and then vanishing. 

Steve sits down next to Bucky, and very carefully laces their fingers together, giving Bucky plenty of time to pull away. 

Peter shakes his head, and smiles at Yana when she shows him what she’s been drawing. 

“Well, my aunt doesn’t know I’m Spiderman, so Mr. Stark had to tell her that this was a Stark Industries internship so that I could come. But she knows I’m here, and school’s out for the summer so it’s not interfering with my studies and I get to spend a couple of months living with the Avengers! I mean how cool is that?” Peter says, and Steve thinks his reasoning is sound, but there’s something else in his voice, that Steve can’t quite pin down. 

It’s Bucky that calls it out though. 

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

Peter nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I saw a little bit about your trial on the news, and I heard a little bit about it all, and I’m really glad to be able to help you out, in any way I can. Just. This is the first time I’ve ever been able to be around other people like me, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Sam asks, closing the book he’d been reading and paying closer attention to the conversation Peter’s having with Steve and Bucky. 

“Well, no one knows I’m Spiderman, besides you guys. I’ve kept it a secret since I became enhanced. I’ve never met anyone else like me. It’s really nice, y’know? To be around people who understand that it’s tough sometimes? I hope you don’t mind if I use this as an opportunity to get some advice sometimes too.” 

Steve likes this kid a lot. 

“Yeah, I know what you mean, Peter. Of course you can. Why don’t we go collect whatever things you brought with you, and I’ll show you to your quarters?” Steve offers, mentally running through what room he can stick Peter in, so he won’t have to hear Steve or Bucky or Tony screaming themselves awake in the middle of the night. The room next to Vision and across the hall from Nat. That’ll be good. Nat’s quiet, and not there frequently, and Vision’s an android. It’ll be for the best. 

Peter perks up at that offer, losing the hunched shoulders he’d had when he was actually asking for something. 

There are two small, worn duffel bags on the floor by the entrance and Steve hefts them both with one hand, nodding in the direction of the personal wing. 

“So, you’re from New York, right?” Steve says, to strike up conversation. 

“Queens,” Peter answers proudly. 

“I’m from Brooklyn. City’s changed a lot since my time though.”

“I can’t imagine. I’ve never really left the city for long. I’ve gone away for competitions and stuff like that, but those were only a couple days at a time. I don’t like leaving my aunt alone.”

“Is it just you two?” Steve asks.

Peter nods. “Yeah. My parents died when I was little, and a little bit after I got my powers, my uncle Ben was killed too. S’what made me become Spiderman, and start helping people. But yeah. It’s just me and Aunt May. Mr. Stark said I can go visit her whenever I want, and that I could have her visit if I wanted, too, but I don’t know about that.”

Steve smiles as he shows Peter into the room that’ll be his for the foreseeable future. He has a feeling they’ll maintain it for him for long after this “internship” is up. “Peter, she’s your family. If you need us to lie to her and tell her you’re just working in the lab with Tony and making coffee runs so that she can visit, we’ll do that. Don’t worry about that. Just worry about you seeing the people you care about.”

“Captain America telling me to lie? Ned’s never going to believe that.”

“Hey. I think I’m pretty much the world’s leading authority on doing whatever it takes to protect the people you care about, kid. Lying about what your job is here is pretty low on the list of things I’ve done.”

Peter snorts out a short laugh and then really looks around the room Steve’s shown him into. 

“This place is huge! I think this room is bigger than my whole apartment!” 

Steve smiles. “It’s all yours. Settle in, a little bit, and if you come find me, I’ll show you the gym and the training rooms, and maybe you can show me what all the Spiderman hype is all about later.”

“That’s awesome, thank you, Capta-- Steve. Thank you Steve.”

“No problem kid.”

Tony definitely made a good choice with this kid, Steve thinks, and he goes to return to Bucky again.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter some asgardians

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> clint is wildly panicky in this chapter, so watch out  
> also, fuck a timeline, i have events happen whenever i want

Peter becomes fast friends with all of the Avengers, Tony, Steve and Bucky especially, given the amount of time he spends in the lab or tutoring Yana, and Steve’s beginning to settle into a routine when that routine is shattered very abruptly. 

And it is shattered by a truly enormous ship breaking Earth’s atmosphere, and then Avengers airspace, and then landing in the vast empty field they had just been training on. The thing is longer than a football field and at least two stories tall. 

Peter looks a perfect blend of terrified and in awe, and half ready to approach the ship when the rest of the team leaps into action. 

Steve barks out orders to the team, falling into ‘Captain’ mode easily and quickly, and Peter looks half about to jump in with them when Steve turns to him and commands, “Take Yana and get down to Tony’s lab. Now! FRIDAY! As soon as Peter and Yana are in the lab initiate lockdown protocol!”

“Of course, sir,” the AI responds.

Peter’s still frozen on the spot, so Steve tries again, in a softer voice, “Spiderman, I gave you an order. Go, now. Keep Yana safe.”

And then Steve grabs his shield, and despite Bucky’s hesitance, he gives Bucky a rifle, and the take up defense positions around the ship, Steve and Tony side by side in the center of the formation, awaiting the ship’s occupant’s first move. 

The door slides open and Steve’s jaw all but hits the floor. 

“Thor?” Clint says, baffled by their friend’s sudden appearance. And it is in fact Thor, with no hair and sans Mjolnir, striding down the ramp to greet them, with Bruce Banner at his left and a woman clad in shining white armor at his right.

Loki is at his back. Clint goes white as a sheet, and stumbles back a few steps, pulling his bowstring taut, though it’s still aimed at the ground. Bucky subtly takes a step in front of Clint, blocking him from Loki’s view.

“Thor, buddy,” Steve greets with a wide grin. This is a vast improvement from what they had thought the situation was. “How are you? What are you doing here? And Bruce! Where’ve you been?” he asks, giving them each a quick hug. He regards Loki carefully, but Loki makes no move to even step off the ship’s ramp, so Steve writes him off as an immediate threat. 

“It is a long story, that I will be happy to tell you later. For now, I have a request. My father is dead and Asgard is destroyed. My sister--” 

“You’ve got a sister?” Tony cuts in, surprised. 

“She’s not very nice,” Bruce supplies. 

Steve furrows his brow in confusion, but returns his attention to Thor. “My sister was growing too powerful. In order to prevent her from destroying much of the known realms, we…” Thor trails off, as though he’s unsure of how to phrase what he wants to say next. 

“We kickstarted Ragnarok. The whole of Asgard is nothing but dust at this point. All of her surviving people are refugees,” the woman in white says. 

Steve cocks his head to the side, and sticks out a hand. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Steve.”

“The Captain of America, yeah. Thor’s told me a bit about you all. I’m Brunnhilde. Valkyrie. His Majesty’s royal guard, I guess.” She regards his hand for a split second before shaking it. “You’ve got a hell of a grip, Captain. I like him,” she says, directing her last words to Thor. 

Thor grins, though there’s still a tinge of sadness to it. “What Brunnhilde says is right. Asgard is gone. Hela killed a great many people, but we saved the few hundred that remained from burning with the realm. Is there anything you can do to help them gain asylum here on Earth?”

Steve claps Thor on the shoulder briefly, and nods, giving him what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “We’ll do everything we can, of course. Is there enough room for them all to be housed on that ship? We can provide supplies for now, but there’s not a lot we can do on giving them a place to stay until everything is taken care of.”

“There is room enough on board. Thank you, Steve.”

Tony steps forward, then, and takes charge. “Alright. Brucie boy. My man. You look a little green, and not in the fun ragey way. Let’s get you inside, and in some clothes that fit. Hey, Xena, Warrior Princess,” he says to Brunnhilde, “can you go in there and round up anyone who needs immediate medical attention, illness or injuries, whatever it is, get them out here.” He turns to the team then, and starts giving them orders as well. “Nat, Wanda, Vision, I want you guys here to help with getting the sick or injured inside. Wilson, Rhodes, we’re going inside, Rhodey is going to call Helen, and then we are placing calls to every person in any position of power we know in the slightest. We’re getting these people supplies by tonight and places to stay by the end of the week if it kills us.”

Everyone glances at Steve, as though looking for confirmation and Steve just nods. “You heard the man. Move!” Steve shouts, and the team breaks, Sam and Rhodey taking off for the compound in the air, while Tony takes the longer way back, walking with Bruce, who seems a little unsteady on his feet. 

Nat, Wanda and Vis hang just behind Steve, waiting while Brunnhilde returns inside the ship with a man in golden armor, who had been standing just behind them. They’re replaced by a woman in red and silver armor and a being that seems to be made of stone. 

“Ah, this is my old friend, the Lady Sif,” Thor introduces. “We grew up together, and have fought side by side for many years. I believe that she and Natasha will get along terrifyingly well.” Sif nods at them and Nat inclines her head and smirks and Steve thinks that the two of them together might be a deadly combination. “Heimdall just went in with Brunnhilde, and this is Korg. He is made of perishable rock.”

“Hello!” Korg says. That’s… new.

Steve smiles at them warmly, if a little confused and at that moment, Heimdall and Brunnhilde return with a dozen or so of the Asgardians from the ship; a handful of young adults, Steve thinks, and a couple of children. 

Nat and Wanda take the children’s hands and lead them towards the compound, while Vision makes sure that the others are steady as they make the trek from the ship to the compound. 

Steve places a hand on Thor’s shoulder again when he notices his friend’s concerned expression. “The docs we have on staff are good. Your people will be well taken care of.” With a glance back at where Clint is doubled over, his bow in a white knuckled grip while Bucky blocks his view of the ship, Steve takes a breath. “We’ve got a lot to catch you up on too, it seems. Come on in, Your Majesty. You look like you could use a moment to breathe, and I’ve got to get the kids out of the lab.”

Thor’s eyebrows shoot towards his hairline. “Kids?”

Steve laughs, and leads Thor, Sif and Brunnhilde towards the compound. 

He does not comment on the fact that Loki has seemingly disappeared. 

~*~

Tony, Rhodey and Sam spend hours making phone calls to every higher up they know in the US government. Natasha calls in a few favors, Steve throws his name around and when Clint finally regains his composure, he throws out a few lines as well. 

By that night, they’ve got enough supplies to last a week for the nearly three hundred Asgardian refugees, a promise to get them paperwork to make them legal refugees in the country, and a promising path to go down to figure out a housing situation. Heimdall and Korg return to the ship with those Helen had treated, to help distribute rations and other necessary supplies. Thor goes out to help, and then returns to the compound, because he promised an explanation. By then, it’s well into the evening, and they’re all exhausted, but they still all sit down for dinner, and Thor regales them with the tale of where he’s been since he left them. 

He tells them about his search for the infinity stones, finding Loki again, losing their father, their sister Hela, their time on Sakaar, finding Bruce, meeting Brunnhilde, returning to Asgard to save it only to find they had to destroy it instead. Bruce politely declines to speak much of his extended period of time as the Hulk. 

In return, Steve and Tony toss the telling of their own story back and forth, finding Bucky and Yana, the ordeal with T’Challa, meeting Shuri, the trial, bringing Peter in. Though their last few months have seemed hectic, Steve thinks in comparison to Thor’s last week or so, it’s almost tame. 

After, Thor inquires about Peter’s life, and Peter enthusiastically replies, talking wildly with his hands and knocking over his drink and Thor’s. They clean it up and Thor goes to replace their drinks, and Steve and Tony don’t realize until long after he’s done it that Thor had placed a pint of beer in front of Peter.

Peter doesn’t drink it, cause he’s responsible like that, but Steve thinks he damn near has a heart attack at that. He’s met Peter’s Aunt May, when he took Peter back to the city to visit last weekend, and that is a woman that Steve is rightfully terrified of.

But dinner is otherwise good, Bucky smiles and laughs at a lot of what Thor, Brunnhilde and Sif tell them, and Thor absolutely adores Yana, and all three of the Asgardians at the table quickly fall in love with Lucky, who’s patrolling around the table looking for scraps, and Steve finally feels like his whole family is back together again, and growing at that, and he hasn’t been this happy in a very long time.

~*~

Clint finds himself in the common area that night, sleep evading him once again. He’s not really surprised. Seeing Loki earlier that day had sent him into a spiral. As much as he’s happy to see Thor again, he is less than thrilled to see his rat bastard brother. 

Bucky’s not with him, like he is most nights, but Yana had wandered in a little while ago, blinking sleepily, and muttering in German that she wanted to see if someone else was up before waking her dad, which is equal parts endearing and heartbreaking that she’s thinking like that at such a young age. 

Clint, of course welcomes her with open arms and lets her curl into his side, and rubs her back while she settles from a nightmare. She’s all but asleep when Clint catches movement in the corner of his eye. 

He’s up off the couch in a flash, putting himself between a now very awake Yana, and Loki, who’s just shown up in the the corner of the living room. Clint’s brandishing a deadly sharp knife before he can even think of it, and the only reason he’s not panicking is because he has to protect Yana, dammit, he can’t lose it now. He has to keep it together to keep her safe. 

“At ease, Agent Barton. I’m not here to harm you,” Loki says, taking a slow step forward, and Clint all but snarls like an animal. 

“You stay away from her, you son of a bitch,” he snaps. 

Loki raises his hands and takes a step back again. 

“I’ll stay here then.” He folds his hands behind his back, and Clint tenses, terrified that he’s going to pull something out that’ll do something terrible, but he just stands there. Almost motionless. Clint’s eyes dart around the room nervously. “I saw your reaction when I stepped off the ship, this morning.”

“And what?” Clint bites out, trying to calm himself down, but he’s breathing hard and he can just barely hear Yana’s whispered concerns, because there’s a ringing building in his ears and no, he can’t be without his hearing right now, he needs everything he can get, he can’t face Loki with any sort of handicap, he knows how well that’ll go, he lived that nightmare once already. “What, you liked seeing me like that and wanted to see it again? Wanted to start up the fucking mind games all over again? Ruining my life once wasn’t enough, you psycho bastard?”

“On the contrary, Agent Barton,” Loki says, his voice level. Even. Calm. Clint wants to put an arrow or six in his chest. Slot them between his ribs like a morbid sort of puzzle. His hands are trembling. He doesn’t know when that started. “I’m here to apologize.”

“What?” Clint says, his voice coming out strangled. 

“Don’t make me repeat myself. I’m not apologizing for my actions in attempting to take over the Earth. That was all good fun. But I realize now, after a bit of self-reflection, that what I did to you…” he pauses, as though deep in thought. “Taking your mind from you like that was wrong. I see that now. I am not saying this to seek forgiveness. I simply think you deserve to hear it. I am sorry, Agent Barton.” 

And then he disappears. 

Yana climbs off the couch carefully, and removes the knife from Clint’s shaking hand, and places it on the table. 

He sits with her, and she curls into him once again, hugging him from the side, and she stays that way until she falls asleep. He stays vigilant through the night, but his hands stop shaking, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the bit with loki and clint is just a bonus scene i had floating around in my head for this verse, so i hope you enjoyed. up next, we get to see our two faves, peter and shuri, in a lab together. thor makes an appearance. it's all lots of fun.


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> science nerds doing science stuff

Shuri returns the day after the Asgardians leave the grounds, headed for a new development that’s been converted to something of a refugee camp, courtesy of a generous donation from Stark Industries. Heimdall, Sif and Korg go with them, and Thor’s sad to see them go, but he knows that the other will be better off with them there to assist them. Thor has a place with the Avengers, and can help more working with the team as a liaison between Earth’s governments and his people from the compound. Loki is nowhere to be found, but Princess Shuri is noticeably there. She announces her arrival by bounding into the compound with a loud and excited greeting. 

She’s got a member of the Dora Milaje who is not Okoye there with her, and who does not speak as much, though the team all greets her warmly. 

Shuri tells them that she’s got an arm for Bucky ready to go, settles in quickly and sets up shop in Tony’s lab once again, saying she just has a few things to work on before she can attach it to Bucky. 

So she gets to work. 

And then Peter finds her. 

Peter and Shuri get on like a house on fucking fire and every adult in their vicinity is very,  _ very _ , concerned that the compound may soon be that house on fire, if the two of them aren’t given some boundaries. To be fair, they did run around talking about making real life lightsabers for the first two hours they knew each other. The fear is well justified.

Luckily for the adults’ collective sanity, like Shuri, once he knows what she’s working on, Peter is just as focused on figuring out how to help Shuri remove Bucky’s arm and replace it with the new one. 

According to Shuri, Bucky is unresponsive to anaesthetics, he’d gone through the procedure to remove an implant without a lick of help, and when he’d first gotten the arm, way back in the early days of the Soldier, he’d, horrifyingly, been awake. Peter almost feels like that’s information he shouldn’t have, but he also needs it to help Shuri. 

They run through several ideas and also two entire pizzas, though that second one is mostly Peter’s fault, before Peter has to run up from the lab to put in some work with Yana for the day, so that they can stay on the schedule he cooked up for them. 

It’s while he’s sitting with Yana, running through English words and phrasing and making sure that she’s initiating conversations in English when she talks to strangers, instead of falling back into Russian or confusing it with German, that Peter finally gets his idea. 

He’s sitting there, listening to Yana ramble on about some TV show she’s discovered when his mind begins to drift a little, thinking how unlike Bucky Yana is, how she speaks so freely, and has a tendency to talk on and on, just like Peter himself does, and he wonders how many traits she really inherited from her father, if they were separated for most of her life up until this point, and what if she developed a personality of her own before ever meeting her father, and he hasn’t really influenced her base characteristics that much yet and the only thing she’s really gotten from him is the benefits of the serum--

Peter’s mind stops short there. 

“Hey, Yana, sweetie, can you go find your dad or Uncle Steve or Uncle Clint or someone? I really have to go help Shuri in the lab, I just thought of something important.”

Yana smiles, and jumps right from her rambling about some animals in a backyard into saying, “Yeah, okay, I’m gonna go find Aunt Tasha, she said she’s make my nails pretty colors,” without skipping a beat, and then she’s off. 

“FRIDAY, make sure she gets where she needs to go? And tell Natasha that Yana’s coming her way, thank you!”

And then Peter’s off, running towards the lab. 

He skids to a halt, crashing into the door on his way in and slams into a stool next to Shuri, who’s staring in despair at her notes about Bucky. 

“We can test it out on me!” Peter exclaims, without any lead in. 

Shuri raises one eyebrow. “Hello to you too. Test what?”

“Hi! Sorry! I just thought of… I mean, I’ve got a healing factor just like Bucky does, right? And I mean we can’t figure things out on him cause he’s uncomfortable with any sort of doctory stuff, yeah? So we can come up with some sort of superdosage of a local anaesthetic or some other kind of drug and we can test it out on me, to see if it’s viable to use for Bucky, before we go trying anything on him, yeah?”

“Peter, that’s dangerous. I’ve never worked with these variables before, I don’t know how strong your healing factor is, and it’s not like I have any room for error here. It’s your life that’s at stake. And even if I did agree, if it works on you, there’s no guarantee it will work on James! Your healing factor comes from a spider bite mutating your DNA. James’s comes from experimentation. It’s far too risky,” Shuri says, slamming her notebook shut, like she was almost hopeful for a moment, and then lost it. 

He can tell she’s frustrated. They’ve been at this for almost two days already and have no ideas so far. And Peter’s seen the arm she’s created for Bucky. It’s incredible. He understands her impatience to see it in action, as well as the desire to finally give Bucky what he deserves. 

Shuri plans to replace the HYDRA arm, a heavy, dated piece of tech that’s weighing on Bucky’s body and causing him pain, which would be amazing enough as is, but she’s gone even further than that. Instead of attaching the entire arm to his body, she’s going to anchor a port to his shoulder, so he can remove the arm itself to sleep or anything else, to take the strain off of his body, even though her design is lighter by far than the original. It’s the most impressive thing Peter’s ever seen, besides Shuri herself. 

She’s kinda amazing. 

But still, they don’t have a way to do all of this without causing Bucky an insane amount of pain. Peter doesn’t want to put him through that again, and Shuri isn’t too keen on it either. 

“Spiderling! Princess! Are you still working on the limb for the Captain’s boyfriend?” Thor booms as he walks into the lab, and Peter jumps in surprise, sticking to the ceiling in the process. It makes Shuri and Thor laugh, so there is that, but it is still a little embarrassing to have to unstick himself and get back to the floor. 

When Shuri collects herself, she nods and waves half heartedly at the case that she brought the arm in. “It was completed when I brought it. The only thing I have to do with it is calibrate it to James’s body when I attach it.”

“Then why the delay? Is he worried about allowing you to alter his body?” Thor asks, touching the arm almost reverently. He looks mesmerized by it. Peter felt the same way. “It’s a truly incredible piece of work. You did this on your own?” Shuri nods. “Amazing. Some of Asgard’s finest wouldn’t be able to create something of this caliber. I am impressed, Princess.”

Shuri smiles, but a glance at her notebook has her scowling again. “Thank you, Thor, but this isn’t… all my work means nothing if I can’t attach it to his body!”

“Do you lack the medical skills?”

“No! I have it planned out to the ‘T’. Helen Cho has agreed to help me with the medical part, because it’s not something I’m an expert in. There’s no hold there. It’s James himself. His body works like the Captain’s, like Peter’s. He metabolizes things too quickly for any drugs to work on him. At this point, he’d have to be awake for me to remove the old prosthetic from where it’s anchored into his body, and to anchor the new port to him. I can’t do that to him. I’m at a loss,” Shuri says. Peter feels bad, she’s worked so hard only to hit this road block. He feels bad for Bucky too. From what Shuri’s told him, the current arm is heavy and malfunctioning and all around, no longer good.

“What about something Asgardian?” Thor says after a beat of silence, and both Shuri and Peter perk up. 

“What do you mean?” they both ask at the same time, and twenty minutes later finds them stealing Tony’s car, with Rhodey’s permission, to go to the nearest grocery store to get the best Earth approximations of the Asgardian herbs that Thor remembers his mother using to make a sleeping tonic, that he thinks can put Bucky under for at least a few hours. 

This solution, Shuri agrees they can try with Peter before they try it with Bucky. Nothing that Thor is proposing is outright poisonous, and even if all of the herbs and oils Thor keeps tossing at them mix poorly in the end, the worst thing that Peter might face is a an upset stomach for a while. With Peter’s healing factor, if that’s the outcome, he’ll only take a little while to heal. Thor swears by it too, says his mother made it often when they were young, mostly for Loki, when he found himself unable to sleep. There’s a hitch in Thor’s voice when he talks about his mom, and Peter recalls something he said at dinner when he first arrived that makes Peter think that he and Loki are the last of their family. And Loki is Loki. So Peter and Shuri share a look, and they both agree that even this weren’t for Bucky’s sake, they’d be on board to let Thor have this walk down memory lane. 

Peter’s pretty sure that by the time they leave the store, there are several pictures of the god of thunder, the Princess of Wakanda and him all over several social media platforms. 

To be fair, they weren’t exactly discreet. Thor speaks very loudly. But it’s a fun trip, so Peter doesn’t much mind.

It’s not until they return to the compound that it occurs to both Shuri and Peter that Thor does not have a driver’s license. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> darcy taught thor how to drive. it was a short lesson and he learned very little. this entire endeavor was very dangerous for all involved.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> new arm and a nightmare

Thor’s solution works. 

The Asgardian brew he cooks up with Shuri and Peter works like a dream, though it’s not as potent as it could be with real Asgardian ingredients. Nevertheless, it is good enough, and Bucky is out cold for just long enough for Shuri to get the port attached to his shoulder. He begins waking up as she and Helen are very carefully connecting a select few nerves to the port, giving him just enough connection to register the pressure sensors. Bucky sits carefully still through the process, hardly even flinching, even though Steve can see the pain etched into his face. 

Shuri’s shoulders tense and her expression goes tight when Bucky wakes, but she doesn’t stop, and neither does Helen, until they’ve finished. They work forward, and Steve lets Bucky grip his hand until he feels like he might lose it. And then it’s done. Shuri leans back with a relieved sigh, and drops her tools onto the lab bench, and smiles, and Bucky, tiredly, smiles back. 

“It’s gone. They’re finally gone, Stevie,” Bucky whispers, and then he laughs almost hysterically, and leaps from his chair, and he gives Shuri a crushing one armed hug, and then he turns to Steve, and grabs him by the shirt, and kisses him like there’s no tomorrow. 

Steve smiles into the kiss and returns it, cupping the sides of Bucky’s face reverently, drawing him impossibly closer. 

Then Peter clears his throat from the doorway, and when Steve glances up, he’s sharing a look with Shuri and Helen has left the room entirely, so Steve draws back, though he places himself in just the right position to lace his fingers with Bucky’s, while Shuri retrieves the actual arm from its case.

Bucky’s expression darkens a little then, and Steve squeezes his hand reassuringly. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

Bucky nods once, jerkily, and goes very still, while Shuri and Peter attach the arm and calibrate it to his nerves, so that he can use it properly. Twice, Bucky lets out a strangled scream when Shuri or Peter prods at something that sparks the wrong way, but otherwise, he doesn’t make the slightest protest to what they do to him. 

“That should do it,” Shuri says, and turns to return the high-five that Peter offers her. “There are release catches that are encoded to only respond to you and Captain Rogers, to remove the arm whenever you need.” She gently guides his flesh hand to the catch near his metal shoulder, to show him where it is and how to use it. 

Bucky stands, flexing his arm to test it out, and overbalances wildly to the right. Steve has to throw out an arm to catch him. 

“I should have warned you,” Shuri says sheepishly. “The other arm was excessively overweight, to give more power to your hits. This gives you all the necessary power, without all the added weight. It’s correctly balanced with the weight of your flesh arm. It will put far less stress on your body, and being able to remove it will allow your enhanced physiology to finally properly heal the junction between the metal and the rest of your body. As much as it can be healed, anyway. The vibranium is also far more resilient than the old arm. But it will take a little getting used to.”

Bucky smiles and hesitantly reaches out with his metal arm to brush his fingers against Shuri’s shoulder. She smiles at the gesture. 

“I believe we are done here, James. I’m very glad to have been able to help you,” she says.

Steve’s really glad she was too.

~*~

Things are going well, for the next few days, especially for the kids in the compound, who Steve can’t help thinking of as  _ his _ kids, though he knows that Shuri and Peter have their own loving families. There’s still a protective feeling he has regarding them, and this sense that they belong to the ragtag group turned family that Steve loves so much. 

Shuri sticks around for a while longer, working on pet projects with Peter, and even teaching Tony and Bruce a few new things, before she leaves again for Wakanda, saying reluctant goodbyes to all of the new friends she’s made. She promises that she’ll return for a longer visit, to truly experience America, as soon as things are more settled in her country, still reeling a little, in the wake of the destruction her cousin had wrought. 

Steve’s sad to see her go. Bucky really seems to like her and so does Yana, and it’s been good for Peter to have a friend his age around, instead of having him stuck with a bunch of adults and a six year old all of the time. But he understands that she has responsibilities, and he won’t be the one to keep her from them. He’s sure they’ll be seeing more of her very soon. 

Peter, on the other hand, is still staying a few more weeks with them, until Yana has completed her placement testing and Tony has finished tinkering with the new suit he’s creating for Peter. They’ve all come to the conclusion that they won’t be able to convince Peter to stop being Spiderman in any capacity, so they might as well keep him safe while he does it. Tony’s doing that through making him a new suit. Steve’s been training with Peter, to up his hand to hand combat skills, though Tony said that wasn’t really on the table. Steve’s never really been one for rules, in the first place. 

It’s Yana who breaks the streak of uninterrupted good days, in the end. Once Bucky had gotten the new arm, it was like his nightmares were taking a break. He still looked a little worse for wear a couple of mornings, but he hadn’t screamed himself or anyone else awake for almost a week, so Steve considered it a win. Yana had gotten to sleep through the night every day for that week too, and that only added to the positives. 

But then, a week after Bucky gets the new arm, the string of good days breaks, as it was bound to do eventually. 

Steve’s hovering in this weird half asleep state when the sound of his door opening jerks him fully into waking with a ragged gasp. 

He flails wildly for a moment, trying to reach for his shield, which he obviously can’t find at his back, because he was asleep, and then grasping for something to use as a weapon and coming up empty. His heart hammers in his chest when he hears footsteps coming into his room, until it registers that they are very small footsteps, and he sits up just in time to see Yana clambering onto his bed, wide-eyed and terrified looking. The second she’s gotten herself entirely on the bed, she flings herself at Steve, clinging to him like her life depends on it, arms looped around his neck in a surprisingly strong grip for a child. 

“Hey, sweetie, what happened? What’s going on? Is your dad okay? Are you okay?” Steve asks, because it’s the only thing he can think to ask. He didn’t hear Bucky waking, so it’s not likely that Yana was woken by him having a nightmare. What else could it have been? He knows she has nightmares too, but he’s never seen her react this badly to one of those. The only times she’s ever seemed this distressed about something, it’s only ever been about… shit.

“Yana, did your dad do something to you? Are you okay?” Because if Bucky’s sleepwalking, or having a flashback someone needs to deal with that, quickly. 

Yana shakes her head and looks up at Steve with shining eyes and starts speaking in rapid, desperate Russian. 

“Kiddo, slow down, I can’t understand you. You need to speak English so I can understand what you’re trying to tell me. It’s okay, you’re safe, I’ve got you,” he tries, but that only seems to make her more upset, like she knows she’s speaking Russian and… “Yana, hey, look at me, and just shake your head yes or no, okay? Can you understand me?” A nod. “Do you know that you’re speaking Russian?” Another nod. “Can you switch back to English for me?” A shake of the head. Fuck. “Okay. Take a deep breath. You’re safe. I’ve got you. Nothing’s gonna happen to you. Why don’t we lay here until you’re feeling a little better and try again?” A nod. Good. 

Steve pulls back the covers and situates himself and Yana underneath them, carefully curling around her protectively, his eyes fixed on the door, just in case. 

It takes nearly an hour before Yana peeks up at him an very quietly says, “He’s gonna kill me.”

Steve’s heart plummets into his stomach. “Who? Who’s going to kill you, Yana?”

Yana doesn’t speak for a moment, fiddling with the necklace that Tony gave her a few weeks into her stay at the compound (a tracking device, just in case, because she’s young and the Winter Soldier’s daughter and Tony’s paranoid). 

“My dad. He’s gonna kill me. He said it himself. He doesn’t want me,” she says miserably, and Steve pulls her closer and holds her tight against his chest because dear god, that must be terrifying for a child to think. 

“Why do you say that? When did he say that?” he asks, trying to figure out how she came to this conclusion and hoping and praying to every god out there that Bucky didn’t try to hurt her. 

“He said it. He did. At the place with the judge, when he was giving a test.”

Oh god. The trial. When Bucky had testified. He’d told them what he had planned to do when he was first going after Yana. He’d been planning to kill her, before he’d met her and he’d admitted that and Yana had been  _ there _ , in the front row, listening to him as he admitted all of that. 

“Did you have a nightmare about it?” Steve asks, and she nods in response. He gently smooths a hand over her hair, carefully guiding her head back so she’ll look up at him. “Yana, sweetheart, your dad would never, ever hurt you on purpose.”

“But he said he wanted to!”

Steve feels like his heart is breaking. “I know what he said. But you know something? A little while ago, your dad hurt me pretty bad too. But it wasn’t because he wanted to. He thought he wanted to, and he felt really bad because of that, but that wasn’t true. All of the bad things that your dad has ever done have never been because he wanted to be a bad man. It was all because of HYDRA. They made him do bad things, and they made him think that it was what he wanted. That’s why he hurt me, and that’s why he thought he was going to hurt you, before he met you. But that’s not who he is. As soon as he remembered me, he stopped what he was doing. And as soon as he saw you, he realized that he didn’t really want to hurt you. It was just something that HYDRA put in his head, making him think about hurting people first, instead of about helping them. But now, Shuri got rid of all the bad stuff in his head that HYDRA put there. So now, he can think how he wants. Not how they wanted him to think.”

“Is that for real?” Yana asks after a beat of silence, still playing with her necklace instead of focusing on Steve. “He really hurt you?”

Steve nods. “It wasn’t really him. That’s why he’s not in trouble for it, and it’s why I’m not mad at him. I’m trying to help him get better instead. Your dad is a very, very good man and a good dad. He’s not ever going to hurt you. He’s going to protect you, because that’s what good dads do.”

It takes a minute, but Yana seems to accept that. “You’re trying to help him cause you like him, too, right? You like him the same way that Uncle Tony likes Aunt Pepper?”

Steve smiles. “I do like him a lot. I’ve liked him a lot for a very long time, but things just kept getting in the way. But now I get to really like him, and I also get you out of it all too, so I think it was all worth the wait,” he says, poking her side to try to get her to smile. She does, the barest hint of one. 

“Do you love him? And if you do, does that make you my dad too?” Yana asks then, and that hits Steve like a smack to the face. 

He shrugs a little. 

“I don’t know if I would say that I love him yet, but I think I will very soon. Your dad means a lot to me, kiddo, and I--” and then Steve looks down, to find that Yana’s fallen asleep again. 

He smiles fondly, and curls up around her a little tighter. He meant what he said. He couldn’t be happier to have gotten her out of all of this as well.


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> something of a happy ending

Steve wakes up the next morning to a panicked looking Bucky, folding in on himself next to Steve’s bed, letting out what sounds like a relieved sigh. Lucky is at Bucky’s heels, whining softly as he noses at the port where Bucky hasn’t yet attached his arm this morning.

“I didn’t know where she was when I woke up, I was so--”

Steve cuts him off, shifting carefully so that he can reach out and place a hand on Bucky’s head, carding his fingers through Bucky’s hair. 

“It’s okay. She had a nightmare, about what you said at the trial, and she freaked out a little, came to find me. I calmed her down, explained it all. She’s fine. It’s all fine, right now, Buck,” Steve promises. Bucky’s eyes go a little wide, and then a lot sad and Steve reaches out a little further, careful not to squish Yana as he rolls over. “Come up here.”

Bucky hesitates, but Steve’s gentle tugging and his request win out in the end. 

“She’s afraid of me,” he whispers. 

“She’s not. She had a nightmare. Kid’s been through hell and come out the other side. She’s seen things no kid should ever have to see, and she spent years with HYDRA, having them fill her head with a bunch of lies about who you are. She’s afraid of that idea. Not of the real you. She needs time to settle down and be a kid, and the rest will follow, with a little bit of help. That’s why Nadia’s here, and why the rest of us have got your backs. Now, it’s still early. Go back to sleep,” Steve commands. Bucky nods and begins to shift, but Steve grabs his arm to stop him. “I meant here, dummy.” 

Bucky hesitates again, so Steve gives him the best puppy-dog eyes he can, and Bucky’s expression melts. The dog leaps onto the bed with them.

“You’re a punk, you know that?” Bucky says, but there’s no heat behind his words. He settles down on the other side of Yana, so she’s tucked in between them, like they’re a protective barrier between Yana and everything the world has to throw at them. Lucky curls up at the foot of the bed, flopping half onto Bucky’s legs. 

Steve smiles and leans over, and presses a kiss to the corner of Bucky’s mouth, and then sinks back into his side of the bed, and falls back into restful sleep. 

Bucky’s still there when he wakes up again, and he can’t say he’d mind waking up like this for the rest of his life.

~*~

It’s Clint and Sam who put it together in the end. Steve doesn’t know how, but they do, and the two of them catch Steve wildly off guard the next week, just after he leaves the gym after a workout. 

“So Cap,” Clint starts, and the tone of his voice has Steve reeling on its own. 

“What did you do? Who’s in the infirmary?” he asks immediately, only half joking. 

“Shut up. I’m offended,” Clint snaps back. Sam doesn’t even try to deny that it’s a possibility. “No one’s hurt. Seriously Steven? I’m hurt. I’m wounded. I’m--”

“You’re done talking,” Sam says, cutting Clint off, and Clint makes a noise of protest at that, but Sam just smiles and continues on. “You said Yana had a couple of rough days recently, and we know she’s got that placement testing in a couple weeks and she’s getting all worried about it. So we had an idea. We took a peek at some files, and we noticed that we missed her birthday, a while back. It’s probably not a big deal to her or to Barnes, but maybe it’d be nice if we throw her a little late birthday celebration. She’s a kid, and that’s a sort of normal thing that she hasn’t really gotten, even since she’s been here.”

Steve smiles and wonders how exactly he wound up with friends as great as Sam Wilson and Clint Barton. 

“What’d you have in mind?” Steve asks, and the grin that spreads across Clint’s face is truly, truly terrifying. 

Sam, Clint and Wanda end up taking care of everything. They tell Steve their plan, and they tell him to tell Bucky, and then they ice him out completely. 

Then Pepper starts officially moving into the compound with Tony, and Steve’s attention is directed towards that instead, him and Bucky helping Tony and Pepper move all of Pepper’s things into Tony’s quarters. All of Steve’s worries concerning Sam and Clint and Wanda planning any sort of celebration quickly fall to the back of his mind. And then that Friday rolls around and he suddenly remembers why he was worried. 

He’s busy most of the day in an intense training session with Peter, Bucky watching from the sidelines, curious how a kid could hold his own against Captain America. Yana’s there too, steadily working her way through an Avengers coloring book. Steve thinks she’s coloring Tony’s skin in purple at the moment. He’ll hate it. Steve thinks it’s great. 

It takes most of the day, but Peter finally pins Steve to the mats, grinning triumphantly and crowing in victory before collapsing to the mat dramatically. “I should quit now, while I’m ahead,” Peter jokes. “I’ve beaten Captain America. I’ve peaked.”

Steve just laughs and helps him to his feet, and sends him off to shower, and goes to do the same himself.

His hair is still damp when he finds Bucky and Yana and they head down to the kitchen for dinner. 

They find the entire kitchen decked out from floor to ceiling in red, white and blue decorations. Yana thinks it’s great. Steve does not think it’s as great as Yana thinks it is. 

“What the hell is this?” Bucky asks. 

“Well, first of all, you wouldn’t believe how cheap Fourth of July decorations are when you’re this far into July. Second of all. It came to our attention that our favorite fossil turned 93 this year, and didn’t say a word about it. And wouldn’t you know it, after a little digging, we find out that Captain America himself was born on the Fourth of July!” Sam says. He’s enjoying this far too much, Steve thinks. “So we decided this could be a late birthday celebration for you too, Cap. Give you a little love.” Then he grabs Steve into a sideways hug for just a moment, and then tugs him out of the way. “Your Uncle Clint and I heard that we missed your birthday, and there’s been a lot of stuff going on lately, so we thought we’d celebrate a little. Cause you deserve it, after being so brave, going through all of it like you did, kiddo.” 

Yana lights up. 

“I never had a birthday before!” she exclaims, clearly excited by the prospect of this entire concept. 

“Well, your Aunt Pepper picked out a really good dinner, and then we’ve got a birthday cake for you and Captain Steve,” Clint says, smirking at Steve when he refers to Steve by Yana’s name for him. Steve just laughs and closes his eyes briefly. Bucky laces his fingers with Steve’s, and it doesn’t escape Steve’s notice that it’s Bucky’s metal hand, the one he usually avoids touching anyone with. Steve’s smile only grows.

It doesn’t dim throughout the entirety of dinner. 

Then Sam and Clint bring out a ridiculously oversized grocery store sheet cake with a horrible rendering of Steve’s face plastered on the top of it, with a truly terrifying number of candles stuck into it. Steve picks up Yana and lays his forehead against her shoulder to hide his face as he laughs at the cake. 

“We couldn’t get enough candles on there without it setting off the smoke detectors, so we did the best we could,” Clint says, as Wanda lights the candles with a wave of her hand. Yana squeals in delight and Steve takes a step back so neither of them catch fire. 

They sing happy birthday and Bucky keeps his hand at the small of Steve’s back for all of it, and Steve helps Yana blow out the candles, but even after the candles are out, the feeling of warmth doesn’t leave Steve. 

He turns to steal a kiss from Bucky, and plants one on the top of Yana’s head and then looks around to the rest of his family. 

They’re a ragtag group of heroes that started out as reluctant acquaintances, and grew into good friends, and then something more, and the group has only grown in a positive way from the original six of them. 

They’ve had bad days. Sometimes it seems like there are more bad days than there are good days. There are bound to be even more bad days, especially with all of the recovering that Bucky and Yana have left to do, the issues the rest of them still have to work through. 

But looking around as his family, and with the man he’s loved for a lifetime already at his side, Steve decides that all those bad days are worth it, for even just one evening like this.

He kisses Bucky again, and that’s all that matters. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we still have an epilogue to go, but the main story here has come to an end! thank you all so much for supporting this story, it means so much! here are a few more tidbits:
> 
> -steve and bucky get married two years later, because they decide they've waited long enough to take a step like that, and they both deserve the happiness. they've loved each other for a lifetime already anyway, why put it off?  
> -they file paperwork six months after that, and steve becomes yana's father as well, officially.  
> -peter leaves the compound to return to school that fall, but he continues to return to the compound to visit the avengers, and he skypes/calls them frequently. he teaches steve how to text like a millennial and everyone else suffers.  
> -peter becomes yana's unofficial big brother. he teaches her a lot about being a kid, when he comes to visit, and as she gets older, yana ends up going to peter for advice a lot. she goes to shuri too, whenever she can.  
> -clint takes the title of bucky's best friend, once bucky's married to his previous best friend.  
> -shuri visits as frequently as she can, to check on bucky's arm and to geek out with peter and because she likes hanging out with thor.  
> -lucky stays with the avengers, and is technically a team dog, but he spends most of his time with clint, or with bucky and steve and yana  
> -bucky moves into steve's room, and leaves his to yana, because he finally feels safe enough to leave her on her own  
> -things don't get fixed, but bucky and yana slowly, and steadily, heal themselves with the help of their family.


	26. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ten Years Later

Yana turns sixteen, and it’s a quiet affair. Steve, Sam and Clint have been called away for a mission that keeps them away for longer than they were anticipating, which sucks, but she’s not too broken up about it. She knows they’ll make it up to her. As it is, Shuri’s flown in from Wakanda, and Peter’s up at the compound from the city, bringing a plate of cookies with him courtesy of his Aunt May. Wanda, Rhodey, Bruce and Natasha have made sure that they don’t get called away for anything. Thor and Brunnhilde have gifted her with the traditional Asgardian coming of age gift of weaponry, a truly beautiful set of daggers that she’s definitely going to have to keep a secret from her dad. Tony and Pepper have promised her a surprise gift that she has to wait for Steve to return to open. Dad’s there, smiling as she basks in being the center of attention, as though she hasn’t been the center of attention since she got there. They have a quiet evening in, and Yana is wildly happy.

The next day, Steve, Sam and Clint come home, and Dad gets called away for something with Natasha, and she’s worried as she always is, but then Steve and Tony and Pepper pull her to the side and she can’t be worried anymore, she’s too focused on what they’re saying. 

“So New York law won’t allow it, but, it’s a quick little trip over to Connecticut, if you want,” Tony says, and Yana furrows her brow in confusion. If she wants what? “We noticed that you’ve brought up your tattoo a few times, and wanting to get rid of it or wishing you could change it. So Pepper made an appointment with a woman that comes highly recommended, and if you want it, we’ll take you right now.”

Yana doesn’t respond, shaking her head because she doesn’t understand, there’s no way they’re really offering to… 

Pepper takes one of Yana’s hands and squeezes. “I looked into it, and this woman specializes in cover up tattoos. Connecticut state law allows a minor over the age of sixteen, with parental consent, to get a tattoo. Steve’s giving his permission, and he’s drawn up something based on what we’ve heard you mention. So you just say the word, and we can go.”

Steve produces a sheet of paper then, obviously torn out of his sketchbook, and scratches the back of his neck nervously. “This is what we sent ahead to the artist. You can obviously make any changes you want, it’s just an idea, but I did my best to put together what you mentioned you might want, and what else I thought you might like.”

The sketch is incredible. It doesn’t cover up the star on her shoulder entirely, but it takes it and it makes it something beautiful, instead of the ugly reminder of her beginnings. 

There’s a pair of arrows, a lightning bolt, Aunt Nat’s hourglass, one of the sigils from Brunnhilde’s sword, a tiny falcon, a swirl of red like Wanda’s magic, something like a spiderweb, an artistic take on a gamma ray symbol, something that Yana recognizes from one of Shuri’s designs, all centered around the star, which has rings around it in a fusion of the design of Steve’s shield and Tony’s arc reactor. All of it is artfully woven with an array of flowers, so that the little symbols, the representations of her family, are only noticeable if you’re really looking for them. 

It’s amazing. 

She blinks away what she denies are tears, and nods, flinging her arms around Steve to pull him into a crushing hug. 

“Yes. Yeah, yeah, let’s go,” she chokes out, her voice catching as her throat as she hugs Tony and Pepper in turn. Then she looks at Steve again, and he reaches out to run a thumb under her eyes to brush away the tears. “Thank you, Dad,” she mumbles, and then Steve’s the one yanking her into an unexpected hug. 

It’s the first time she’s ever called him that, she thinks. 

Saving it for a perfect occasion, it seems.

They return that evening to find that Dad and Aunt Nat have returned. There’s a knowing smile on Nat’s face as Dad asks, “Where have you been?” before greeting Steve with a kiss. 

Yana nudges up her sleeve, and Dad’s eyes widen at the sight of the gauze before she gently pulls it off to reveal the art underneath. 

“Steve gave the okay, Robocop, but we thought we’d surprise the kid for her birthday. Sixteen is coming of age, getting a license, gaining a degree of freedom. Thought we’d give her a little more freedom in a different way, too,” Tony says, wrapping an arm around Pepper’s shoulders.

Yana watches her dad nervously. “Do you like it? Steve designed it for me, so that I could finally… It’s not ugly anymore. It’s not theirs anymore. I’m not theirs anymore, Dad. This was it and I got rid of it and I’m… Uncle Tony’s right. I’m free now. Really free.”

Dad steps forward and, careful of the new tattoo, pulls her into a hug, pressing a kiss to her hair. She’s almost as tall as him, she thinks, distantly. 

“I love it. I’m so happy for you, Yana. I love you.” 

“I love you too, Dad,” Yana says, returning the hug. 

“No more surprise tattoos,” he says after a minute, and she’s certain he’s glaring at Tony over her shoulder. 

She laughs and nods, drawing away from him. “No more. I think I’m good with just the one. It’s all I need.”

And it is. It’s a representation of her family, of all the people who pulled her out of hell and shaped her into the young woman she is. It’s everything she is and everyone who made her that way, the good and the bad, all in one. 

It really is all she needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for living through this story with me, it was such a joy to write, and i hope you've loved reading it as much as i've loved creating it! come find me on tumblr to talk to me about the story or to ask about other things in this verse!

**Author's Note:**

> scream at me on tumblr @ _[deafclintbartn](http://deafclintbartn.tumblr.com/)_


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